Blog

Overview I wrote a blog post last year on Fabric Warehouses and the new Case…

Overview I’ve been turning my attention to disaster recovery processes in Microsoft Fabric recently, to…

Overview Welcome to the world of Microsoft Fabric Warehouses and the deployment of data loading…

Overview Relationships are tricky at the best of times…but working with relationships between tables in…

Overview Each of the 6 sections below have several skills being measured for the Databricks…

Overview Announced at Microsoft Ignite on November 24 were a batch of new features for…

Fresh from Microsoft Ignite on November 24, Microsoft has introduced a new feature in Fabric, Open…

Overview V-Order is Microsoft’s “special sauce” to further optimise data within Parquet files and is…

Overview Monitoring warehouse queries is crucial for maintaining the efficiency and performance of SQL Analytics…

New certification time! At FabCon Europe, a new certification was announced…the Microsoft Fabric Data Engineering…

Overview I’m not saying this blog coincides with the current active Fabric Trials coming to…

Overview Warehouse Monitoring and Query Performance Analysis? Yes…it’s important! You’ve spent time building a Data…

Overview This blog post takes a little step back from specific technology itself, something I…

Challenge: How can I see the underlying storage and files being used in my Fabric…

With cloud technology, vendors will say you don’t have to worry about anything, it just…

Overview With the recent announcement from Microsoft that ALTER TABLE…ADD COLUMN is now supported in…

Overview Welcome to part 3 of this Fabric Warehouse for the DBA series in which…

Overview One question I see quite regularly on forums and social media is the pricing…

Overview This is the second part of the Fabric Warehouses for DBAs blog series, if…

Overview Let me start off this blog post by saying that no matter what data…

Overview Along with Managed Private Endpoints, another security feature was released at the same time…

Managed Private Endpoints in Public Preview Security fans rejoice (and companies that don’t appreciate leaving…

Overview I’ve been looking at implementing a proof-of-concept for the Fabric Link for Dataverse functionality…

Overview Probably one of the most hotly anticipated services is available within Fabric now, as…

Overview As of 12th January 2024, the beta exam for the new Microsoft Certified: Fabric…

This blog will be split over 2 parts, in this first part we’ll look at…

Overview Recently I’ve been reading through Microsoft’s documentation on implementing medallion lakehouse architecture in Microsoft…

Well this new Explore This Data (link) feature in Power BI surprised me, both in…

As I start to look at how to architect and develop data solutions using Microsoft…

Ignite is always exciting as there’s always a bunch of new announcements, and included in…

Here are the slides for my Fabric SQL Warehouse session at #DataWeekender 6.5. Download PDF…

Microsoft announced a new accreditation path recently called Microsoft Applied Skills (link here), a set…

I joke about “I’m not much of a Spark Developer” all the time and I’m…

Working with source control in a Synapse Analytics workspace is a fairly straight-forward process, however…

Fabric Warehouses are a SQL focused service for building data warehouse structures within a Fabric…

Recently I had a challenge in terms of providing a least permissions possible security model…

Session Abstract It all started with Parallel Data Warehouse, then came Azure SQL Data Warehouse…then…

It’s recommended in a Synapse environment, especially a production/live environment, to lock a Synapse Analytics…

If you’re interested in using Synapse Link for Dataverse with a Dynamics 365 environment to…

I trust everyone has been having fun with Fabric over the last few weeks, diving…

This blog has been adapted from an earlier blog about using temp tables in Synapse…

I always like to have a dig around, try a few things and see if…

This is a placeholder blog which will be revisted many, many times over the coming…

There’s been an exciting new announcement at Microsoft Build in the form of Microsoft Fabric,…

Welcome to part 2 in the Synapse Link for Dataverse Delta Lake series. In the…

Microsoft recently released the ability to configure Synapse Link for Dataverse and use Delta Lake…

In this blog I’m continuing my series about using Power BI and Azure Synapse Analytics…

Every so often the “star schema is dead! dimensional modelling is dead!” discussion rolls around…

Here’s an Azure Synapse Serverless SQL Pools Cheat Sheet I created to help anyone reference…

Always ask “why.” I really couldn’t think of a better blog title, I usually do…

Welcome to this new blog series in which I’ll be diving into both Power BI…

Some of the skills measured for the DP-500 Azure Enterprise Data Analyst Associate certification are…

A question that is often asked about Azure Synapse Analytics is how it handles Delta…

I’ve been diving into Synapse Link for Dataverse recently for a project and created a…

Around November 2022, Microsoft announced a new feature within Power BI which allows you to…

In the first part of this blog series we looked at how to configure Synapse…

Retrospective Another year has rolled by (where does the time go…) and another year in…

The General Session agenda for SQLBits 2023 is now available here and covers the agenda…

This blog forms part of the DP-500 blog series on this site here and also…

I’ve been looking at taking the Databricks Data Engineer Associate Certification (the Databricks page for…

Part of the Azure Synapse Analytics suite of services is Synapse Link. This enables synchronization…

This was originally posted on my Datahai company blog in November 2021. This blog has…

This blog forms part of the DP-500 blog series on this site here and also…

I’m currently in the process of building a Query and Workload Analyser Power BI report…

In a recent Synapse Analytics Serverless SQL Pools QnA session, the Serverless SQL Pools team…

Firstly, I’d like to say a huge thank you to the Data Relay team, the…

Recently I have been exploring an option to use an Azure SQL Database for a…

This blog is marked as intermediate knowledge as an understanding of Serverless SQL Pools is preferable, but…

This blog is marked as intermediate knowledge as an understanding of Serverless SQL Pools is…

My PASS Data Community Summit 2021 recording is now available, please click here for the…

Welcome to the 3rd and final part in this blog series in which we’re looking…

Welcome to part 2 in this blog series in which we’re looking at what happens…

I encountered an issue with Azure Synapse Analytics Lake Databases and I’d like to share…

Part of the upcoming Azure Enterprise Data Analyst Associate exam, the DP-500, is to understand…

Part of the upcoming Azure Enterprise Data Analyst Associate exam, the DP-500, is to understand…

This blog forms part of the Mastering DP-500 exam series. A list of available blogs…

This blog forms part of the Mastering DP-500 exam series. A list of available blogs…

I am collaborating with Data Mozart on blogging around the upcoming Microsoft Certified: Azure Enterprise…

Microsoft has created a new certification, the Microsoft Certified Azure Enterprise Data Analyst Associate (link…

Serverless SQL Pools offers a straight-forward method of querying data including CSV, JSON, and Parquet…

Here is the link to the slides for the Power BI UK User Group session…

I presented a 20 minute session at SQLBits 2022 in which I talked about how…

In part one we looked at a process in which a pre-aggregated dataset can be…

Dedicated SQL Pools have a feature called Materialized Views which can generate a pre-calculated/processed dataset…

The slides for the DataMinutes #2 session Turbocharging Power BI using Synapse Analytics is available…

SQLBits is back this year and is running from Tuesday 8th to Sunday 12th March…

The next DataMinutes conference (#2) is taking place on Friday 21st January. What’s different about…

In this video we’re talking a look at the new Power BI Hybrid Tables feature…

One of the objects that can be created within a Serverless SQL Pools database is…

A recent feature to be released for Serverless SQL Pools is error handling when processing…

Data Toboggan is a community-driven conference focused on Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft’s flagship data warehousing,…

PASS Data Community Summit 2021 Slides Please click here for a PDF copy of the…

Synapse Analytics allows the creation of External Tables and Views within a Serverless SQL Pools…

Microsoft provide an Azure Architecture Centre which contains resources to understand which Azure services are…

When data is stored in Azure Data Lake Gen2, we can use Azure Active Directory…

Azure Purview is a Microsoft Data Governance service which enables an organisation to map their…

Temporary (temp) tables have been a feature of Microsoft SQL Server (and other database systems)…

Serverless SQL Pools do not contain data (unlike Dedicated SQL Pools) but rather allow you…

Serverless SQL Pools includes 2 SQL functions, filepath and filename, that can be used to…

When using Serverless SQL Pools to write data to Azure Storage/Data Lake Gen2 using the…