Azure Data and Power BI News (June 2022)

I personally like June very much. Every year it's a month of waiting for summer holidays, in my country typically warm and full of sun, conducive to outdoor activities (like cycling). At Microsoft June is also the end of a fiscal year, so pretty intensive time. And what about cloud technologies? Well, as you might guess, tons of news as every other month (cloud services rush like a speeding bicycle!). Let me share with you what news in Azure and Power BI I have spotted in the past 30 days.

Azure

• Traditionally, I'll start with Azure Synapse Analytics. In our monthly blog post you will find quite a lot of updates, to list some of them: Fuzzy Join option in Join transformation of data flows, general availability of Map Data tool, increased size of query result sets in Serverless SQL pools (400GB), drillthrough with parameters in Azure Data Explorer dashboards, pipeline re-runs with new parameter values, user defined functions for mapping data flows in ADF and Synapse Pipelines (preview), Azure Orbital Analytics sample with Azure Synapse (spaceborne data analysis). As a reminder, you can keep an eye on Azure Synapse monthly updates using a single link: https://aka.ms/SynapseMonthlyUpdate.
• For Azure Synapse you might also find interesting the new Azure Synapse Customer Success Engineering Success by design repository in product documentation. This guidance can be helpful for: running a successful Azure Synapse PoC, implementing a solution that incorporates Azure Synapse, and addressing complex topics, including security, networking, troubleshooting, performance tuning, and migration.
• Also, do not miss the opportunity to join the Azure Synapse Influencer program and become an active community member: https://aka.ms/SynapseInfluencers (we've just had our very first event for influencers - Ask the Expert on Data Integration with Mark Kromer and Sunil Sabat from the product team, and there is another one on Apache Spark 3.2 with Simon Whiteley, Microsoft MVP, coming soon!).
• Two interesting updates to Azure Data Factory: you can now include ADF global parameters in ARM template (easier release process!) and there is a public preview of Time-To-Live (TTL) in managed virtual network (you can now reserve computes when working with ADF within managed VNet and these computes won’t be released within TTL period after the last activity execution).
• Azure Data Explorer has a new home page for Web UI. The new home page provides quick access to a sample gallery and free ADX cluster. For those of you who don't know ADX, there is a nice short blog post on when to use this awesome big data interactive analytics platform.
• You can now use Microsoft Purview access policies for Azure SQL (in preview) to manage access to the data assets in Azure SQL Database (Read, SQL Performance Monitor and SQL Security Auditor are available policy actions).
• Good news for all of you who use Event Hubs. You can now capture event streams of Event Hubs?in Parquet format to storage services (this feature is in public preview).
• Any H2O.ai fans in the room? There is a new Azure Machine Learning's integration with H2O.ai. Using this integration, models built in H2O.ai now appear as a deployed model within an AzureML workspace and can be invoked directly as services.
• Talking about AzureML, we got a general availability of Azure Machine Learning (Azure ML) Kubernetes compute. Using this capability, you can: deploy ML workload on customer's managed AKS cluster, run Azure ML workload on Arc Kubernetes cluster right where data lives (data residency, privacy and compliance!), deploy ML workload or aspect of ML lifecycle across multiple public clouds, address hybrid workload scenarios.
• I realize the number 1 news for Databricks users are the some of the announcements from Data + AI Summit (e.g. Delta Lake 2.0 fully open sourced), but there is a cool update to Azure Databricks as well. You can now use change data capture (CDC) in Delta Live Tables (using SQL and Python interfaces) to update tables based on changes in source data. Delta Live Tables supports updating tables with slowly changing dimensions (SCD) type 1 and type 2. Check out how easy it is to set up with SQL ("STORED AS SCD TYPE 2") ;-)
• There is even more. In the documentation of Azure Databricks, we got a brand-new set of software engineering best practices for notebooks.
• The Azure data community was very active in June. Some examples of community contributions I spotted this month: an article New CI/CD flow in Azure Synapse Analytics using Azure DevOps 10 step guide by Ryoma Nagata (Microsoft MVP), two blog posts Azure Synapse Link for SQL – how it works? and Loading Azure Synapse Dedicated SQL Pool with COPY INTO by Adrian Chodkowski (Azure Synapse Influencer - Champion), Contoso DataGenerator by SQLBI.com (yes, it generates data you can play with), a video Synapse Analytics Lake Databases and External Tables Storage Setup by Andy Cutler (Microsoft MVP), a blog post Initial tests for Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 by Kevin Chant (Microsoft MVP), a blog post Microsoft BI Tools: Break or stop ForEach loop in ADF and Synapse by Joost van Rossum (Microsoft MVP), a blog post Updated Microsoft Purview Pricing and Applications by Erwin de Kreuk (Microsoft MVP).

Power BI

• The June 2022 update for Power BI contains some new features and lots of updates that are extensions to the features introduced in previous updates. Examples: canvas zoom in Teams and quick create (last month we got canvas zoom in Desktop and Service), information protection updates (sensitivity labels applied to shared datasets), table visual improvements (new keyboard shortcuts for navigation, enhanced row selection, updated conditional formatting icons for accessibility, improved performance of scrolling), connector for Power BI Datamarts, embedding live Power BI report in PowerPoint directly from Power BI Service (Power BI Storytelling), data hub (central location in Desktop and Service to connect to Power BI data items across all workspaces in the tenant), updates to Power BI Metrics (milestones, categorical metrics, bulk updates), new and updated connectors (new connector for Databricks with OAuth on AWS, new SingleStore connector, updated Databricks, Dremio Cloud and Snowflake connectors).
• Also, in the data hub we got a new way to preview data for datasets. This option allows a user to preview data from dataset's tables, export to different formats and... save customized table as a Paginated Report to a workspace! If you are interested in sharing your feedback about creating formatted tables, you can join the panel of Microsoft User Research.
• As always, the Power BI community was super active in June. Some examples of the content I read or watched this month: a video Mastering DP-500 Exam: When to use DirectQuery in Power BI (see the whole DP-500 series) and an article Power BI Aggregations — the Ultimate Guide by Nikola Ilic (Microsoft MVP), a blog post Loading 1 Billion New York Taxi Dataset into Datamart (it worked!) by Mimoune Djouallah, a blog post Migrate Analysis Services models to Power BI using Tabular Editor by Marc Lelijveld, an article on monitoring Power BI Gateways by Rui Romano (Microsoft), a blog post Monitoring Power Query Online Memory And CPU Usage by Chris Webb (Microsoft).

As a reminder, you can find all the official June announcements for Azure and Power BI on the?Azure Updates website?and the?Power BI blog. In addition, you can follow Azure updates in a more "graphical" form using?Azure Charts (Heat Map), and with Power BI you can be up to date thanks to the?Power BI Release Plan?report.

That's all for now folks! As always, feel free to like and comment this article. Share your findings and thoughts with me and the community!

And now I'm counting down the hours until the long-awaited vacation. But do not think that I will completely break away from Azure and Power BI. No way! On July 9 I will be (on vacation) a speaker on Data Toboggan Cool Runnings 2022 :-)

I wish you all a good weather for holidays and a lot of success in working with the data this summer! See you in a month.