In this episode, Shannon Lindsay from the Microsoft Community team joins me to talk about, well, community! We talk about her trajectory from non-profit space, to Power BI developer, to Microsoft employee. We go over how social media is fragmented and the joy of finding your friends.

• Dunbar's number
• Understand translytical task flows
• Data Witches
• Microsoft Fabric Community

In this episode, Shabnam Watson talks about dealing with Fabric overwhelm and how her bureaucratic experiences with Azure and Synapse motivated her to learn Fabric. She talks about how it's important to focus on finding a way that works with the tool instead of finding the "best" way. In general, the best lesson is to find ways to tie your new learning. We also touch on the DP-600/DP-700 certifications.

• Analytics Engineering with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI (O'Reilly, early release)
• The Analytics Engineering Podcast (dbt Labs)
• Design for How People Learn by Julie Dirksen
• What is Copy Job in Data Factory
• Microsoft Exam Replay

In this episode, Microsoft MVP Prathy K talks about her journey into Microsoft Fabric from her MSBI background. She explains how Fabric felt like "coming home" since she could map SSIS, SSRS, and SSAS concepts to new tools. We discuss how medallion architecture is really just rebranded data warehousing layers and why Fabric can feel overwhelming if you haven't kept up with the big data world.

• Microsoft documentation on medallion architecture
• What is a lakehouse? (Databricks, 2020)
• Big Data or Pokemon? (circa 2013)
• Fabric Capacity Metrics app
• Fabric benchmarking loading CSV

In this episode, Microsoft MVP Angela Henry asks me questions about Microsoft Fabric. We compare the current Fabric development timeline to the old Power BI development timeline. I talk about when Fabric makes the most sense, in my personal opinion. It was a surprise this episode to hear about SSRS.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_crab
• SVG images in Power BI (2018)
• Fabric Roadmap

In this episode, Juliana Smith talks about accessibility in Power BI. She talks about starting out as a data scientist and moving to Power BI. We talk about how impairments can be temporary or varied and how accessibility helps everyone. We discuss simple, low-effort changes like font sizes, labels, and color contrast.

• Megean Longoria on accessibility
• Inclusive Design Toolkit
• Accessibility Insights for Windows
• Accessibility documentation for Microsof Power BI
• Juliana’s YouTube
• Juliana’s Blog

In this episode, Heidi Hastings joins to discuss the practical realities of adopting Microsoft Fabric. We cover her early exposure to Fabric through the MVP preview, the challenges of understanding and implementing it across real-world projects, and the often-overlooked learning curve for newcomers. 

Heidi shares insights into common misconceptions driven by marketing materials, gaps in documentation, and the difficulty of navigating architectural decisions like Lakehouse vs. Warehouse. 

Links

• You could have invented Microsoft Fabric
• Guy in a Cube
• Rui Romano
• Workout Wednesday
• Kerry Kolosko
• Megean Longoria
• Data witches
• Synapse Espresso
• Contoso generated dataset
• Australia timezones

In this episode, Sukhwant Kaur the PM for SQL DBs in Fabric, talks about the new feature. She talks about how management is much easier, which is great for experimentation. SQL DBs are very popular for metadata pipelines and similar. It’s exciting as a way to enable writeback and curated data storage for Power BI. We also talked about AI features and workload management.

Links

• Vector support for in Azure GA
• Surge protection in Fabric

In this episode, we talk with Emilie Rønning about notebooks. We talk about how notebooks can be used for data engineering and when to get started with them. One of the nice things about notebooks is that you can easily debug individual steps instead of having to search a whole script for an error. We also discuss when to learn notebooks. Near the end we talk about how exporting notebooks risks exfiltrating data.

Links

• ROC in statistics
• REPL Loop
• Literate programming
• U-SQL language
• Fabric February
• Lucid Will capacity tracking
• Semantic link BPA
• Best Practices aren't always helpful
• The hidden risk in Fabric notebook exports

In this episode, Elayne Jones talks about being an expert reference for the IT Center of Excellence and about administering Fabric. We talk about the types of things that can be administered and some of the challenges.

• Deploy Power BI from OneDrive
• Matthew Roche: problem domain and solution domain
• Publish to web turned off by default now
• 1,000 item limit in Fabric workspaces

In this episode, Meagan Longoria talks about Databricks and helps us compare it to Fabric. The general conclusions is Databricks is still the mature tool, but Fabric is making improvements. 

In reality, there is space for a hybrid approach and if you have to start somewhere with Fabric, it likely makes sense to start with Power BI and work your way back, where this value. We also talk about how the way Fabric is structured can sometimes lead to messy workspaces.

Links

• Items limitations in workspaces
• Conway's law (you ship your org chart)
• Fabric Guidance for Small Businesses (from Eugene)
• Fabric mirroring for Azure Databricks
• Semantic model refresh activity