It’s been a great week with plenty of new announcements, interesting articles and useful blog posts covering Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics and Data Factory.
Power BI
Over on the Power BI official blog there have been several announcements, here’s my top 3.
- Premium Per User – This brings the power of Power BI Premium to individual users from November 2020! Microsoft have released a sign-up form here which you can use to register for access to the Premium Per User feature. This feature will be free while in public preview but eyes peeled for any pricing. Read more…
- Certified and Promoted Reports and Apps – Now Reports and Apps can be flagged as Certified or Promoted along with Datasets and Data Flows. This allows you to highlight reports and apps to allow users to find authoritative content. Read more…
- Power BI Connector to Azure Databricks Public Preview – For organisations that have Azure Databricks as part of their data platform, the Power BI connector is now available in the Power BI Service along with Desktop. A stand-out from this feature is Azure Active Directory authentication passthrough from Power BI to the Azure Databricks service. Read more…
Power BI Premium announcements cover a new Power BI Report Server release here and the SQL-cache performance enhancing Data Flow Enhanced Compute Engine is now enabled by default here.
Azure Synapse Analytics
- VLDB Polaris Whitepaper – This whitepaper details the POLARIS engine that underpins the Azure Synapse Analytics SQL engine and covers the underlying architecture. Make sure you brush up on your algebra before diving in. Link to the whitepaper here. Link to the whitepaper courtesy of @mim_djo.
- Migration to Azure Synapse Analytics Webinar – There’s a webinar on November 12th showcasing migration to Azure Synapse Analytics alongside Informatica. Read more…
- Knowledge Centre in Azure Synapse Analytics Studio – If you’ve just been getting started with Azure Synapse Analytics then the addition of the Knowledge Centre will help out as it contains samples and learning resources. The Knowledge centre has been available for the last few weeks. Read more…
Data Factory
- Performance Tune ADF Data Flow Transformations – Mark Kromer (@KromerBigData) has released the 3rd part in a series on performance tuning Azure Data Factory Data Flows which also includes a downloadable slide-deck. Read more…
Community
- Data Culture: The Importance of Strategy – Matthew Roche (@SQLAllFather) continues the excellent video series on Data Culture with The Importance of Strategy available here.
- Azure Synapse Analytics – Lambda Patterns with Synapse Link On-Demand – Simon Whiteley (@MrSiWhiteley) from Advancing Analytics (@AdvAnalyticsUK) continues the excellent Azure Synapse Analytics video series looking at querying CosmosDB using SQL Serverless here.
- Data Witches: New Blog Site – Shannon Lindsay (@shan_gsd) and Stephanie Bruno (@StephTBruno) have created a new blog site with all things Power Platform including Power BI, Power Automate and Power Apps. The blog is here.
- Slicing Data with Images in Power BI – Nikola Ilic (@DataMozart) has blogged about how to use images for slicing data in Power BI reports here.
