dataMinds News Round up –
October 2023
Fabric Semantic Link has finally been announced and is available for everyone to use. If you know Sandeep Pawar and have followed his blogs/presentations, you know that he’s very passionate about data science, Power BI, notebooks and Python. If you ever meet with product PMs from Microsoft, invariably they will ask you “If you had a magic wand, what feature would you want?” In all of his interactions with them in the last two years, his answer was “Something that would allow me to easily access the Power BI semantic model using Python/R/spark in a notebook so I could enrich/augment Power BI reports with data science insights & solutions.” Well, they clearly listened to him, took notes and made that wish into a reality. Semantic Link does all of the above things plus more. Before he explains what Semantic Link is, Sandeep will set the stage first. He’ll explain the need, use cases and some of the Semantic Link features. Hopefully, at the end of the blog, you will be as excited as he is!
If you are familiar with mssparkutils , you know that it is packed with utilities to perform common notebook tasks such as getting a list of files and folders, mount points, copying files, running notebooks etc. in Fabric. The Fabric notebook team has been adding new tools to mssparkutils to accelerate development. One such recently added method is fastcp which as the name suggests is similar to the existing method cp to copy files but it’s orders of magnitude faster. Sandeep Pawar is your guide for the day!
React fast to changes in data with an automated system of detection and action using Data Activator. Monitor and track changes at a granular level as they happen, instead of at an aggregate level where important insights may be left in the detail and have already become a problem.
As a domain expert, this provides a no code way to take data, whether real-time streaming from your IoT devices, or batch data collected from your business systems, and dynamically monitor patterns by establishing conditions. When these conditions are met, Data Activator automatically triggers specific actions, such as notifying dedicated teams or initiating system-level remediations.
Join Will Thompson, Group Product Manager for Data Activator, as he shares how to monitor granular high volume of operational data and translate it into specific actions.
Last week, Microsoft announced the very first Fabric Roadmap!
The regular publishing of this roadmap will help ensure you have line-of-sight into how Fabric is going to address your needs.
Currently, the Power BI roadmap is published in the Power Platform release plans. We plan to merge those Power BI plans into the Fabric Roadmap. After that, you will have a single, unified roadmap for all of Microsoft Fabric.
Microsoft OneLake is the OneDrive for data providing a single, unified data lake as a service for your entire organization. While OneLake provides a location to store data, shortcuts can virtualize data that you have stored elsewhere into OneLake even if that data resides in another cloud. With shortcuts, data will appear in OneLake as if it were physically there without any data movement or duplication.
You can now create shortcuts directly to your Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data in Dataverse and analyze it with Microsoft Fabric alongside the rest of your OneLake data. There is no need to export data, build ETL pipelines or use third-party integration tools. Simply click Link to Microsoft Fabric and you can start working with your data immediately.
Recently, Microsoft announced the availability of Column-Level and Row-Level Security in Fabric Warehouse & SQL Endpoint in Public preview in all regions!
In today’s data-driven world, organizations are constantly collecting vast amounts of sensitive information that fuels their operations, decision-making processes, and competitive edge. While data accessibility is essential for business success, ensuring the confidentiality, integrity, and privacy of this information is equally critical. Enter Column-Level and Row-Level Security, two powerful data security strategies that tackle exactly these issues for your organization. Stijn Wynants shines his light.
Last year, Matthew Roche shared an overview of his career in data and tech. Back in March he looked back on his first five years on the Power BI CAT team. Quite a few of his posts over the years have included insights into aspects of his day job. Today he’s going to take advantage of this big milestone to reflect on the bigger picture, and asks himself “if I could go back to 2008 and give Past Matthew advice, what would I tell him?”
Congratulations Matthew on 15 years Microsoft!
