The Latest(ish) in Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric July 2023 Update

I hadn’t realised this update had happened until last week and I suspect the August one will be along very soon!?I did cover the July 2023 Power BI Update and that is included within this Fabric update too.?I don’t know if we will get two separate update blogs from Microsoft ?going forwards – we shall see.

The summary video is 34 minutes long but you probably won’t need to watch it all.?Forget the Power BI part if you saw the July 2023 Power BI Update and then, if you are not a data scientist, the sections on data science and data engineering may not be of so much interest.

Even so there is a lot to cover so here is my precis if you don’t what to read the full blog or watch the video.

• The help pane updates are welcome and make it easier to find what you need without a wider Google or Bing search.
• Customising what you see in the monitoring hub is handy too but remember this is only one aspect of understanding what is going on in your Power BI (or Fabric) tenant.?I suggest you check out Power BI Insights & Consulting | Altis Consulting UK if you are looking for more.

• There are a lot of updates to the Data Warehouse but I just want to focus on Dataflows Gen2 capability which now means you can create these from within the Data Warehouse experience without having to move across to Data Factory.?

• Talking about Data Factory, again, there are a lot of updates but the artefact parametrization is a welcome feature to assist with deployment.

• Data Activator looks interesting and I feel that this will have an important place in the Data and Analytics team armoury. I have not had the opportunity to experiment with this yet but I am sure that many senior executives will appreciate being prompted to act rather than having to search for reports, interrogate them and then determine what action to take.

• Community resources are growing as are Microsoft training courses.?Our training courses will also evolve to include more Fabric elements over time.?Watch this space!

I have great hopes for Microsoft Fabric and I believe it will change the way that many organisations approach data and analytics for the better.?There are great benefits to be realised but there are potential downsides (or at least things to be aware of) too.

Please feel free to get in touch if you would like to chat more about Fabric or Power BI.