Field notes, deep dives, and licensing breakdowns from twenty years of building on Power BI, Fabric, and Azure analytics.
Most of what is written about AI in data work falls into two buckets: AI will replace developers within two years, or AI is glorified autocomplete. Both are wrong. After months of daily use on Microsoft Fabric engagements, the honest answer is that AI is not a people replacement but a power multiplier, and like…
A reader asked the right question after our last post on three-layer pipeline monitoring: what does it cost in CUs? Microsoft has not published authoritative figures, and the Capacity Metrics App will not separate monitoring overhead from everything else your Eventhouse is doing. The only way to get a real number is to measure. Here…
Out of the box, Microsoft Fabric pipelines fail in ways that are easy to miss. After a couple of years shipping Fabric platforms into production, we now deploy the same three-layer monitoring pattern on every engagement: collect with Workspace Monitoring, diagnose with saved KQL queries, notify with tiered Data Activator triggers.
Five days in Atlanta at FabCon + SQLCon 2026. The most useful signal at a Microsoft conference is not the keynote — it is the hallway, the session Q and A, and the conversations with the engineers who built the thing you are deploying on Monday morning. Here is what I brought home: three things…
Hard to Believe It’s December Already: My Year of Learning Microsoft Fabric As the year winds down, I find myself reflecting on what a journey it’s been. Honestly, it’s hard to believe we’re already stepping into December! This year, for me, was all about diving deep into Microsoft Fabric—really getting to know how it works…
To wrap up this series, here’s a compilation of the most frequently asked questions I’ve received about fabric licenses, as well as those I’ve come across in posts and videos that have helped me understand it better. I hope they are helpful to you too! 1. Is Microsoft Fabric included with Power BI Premium? Yes,…
Since there is currently no exact formula for calculating the capacity size you will need, it is recommended that you start with the Fabric trial (which allows to test Fabric with 64 CUs performance) or choose a pay-as-you-go Fabric capacity size for testing and then, use the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app, which allows users…
Microsoft Fabric license types Microsoft Fabric provides a diverse range of licensing options, categorized primarily into capacity-based and individual user licenses. 1. Capacity Licenses -F SKUs (Dedicated capacity) – Known as Premium licenses in Power BI. – They provide the infrastructure for Microsoft Fabric. Without a capacity license, users can’t work in Fabric. – Capacity…
Microsoft Fabric is a complete data analytics SaaS solution that offers a wide range of analytics workloads, including Data Integration, Warehousing, Engineering, Business Intelligence, Data Science, and Real-time Analytics. Essentially, it provides all the tools and resources you need for comprehensive data analytics projects. As organizations consider implementing Microsoft Fabric, understanding its licensing and cost…
Scenario 1: Multiple fact tables thar are not related to each other Solution: Relate every dimension with their respective fact tables. Identify the shared dimensions. Relate them with every fact. Sometimes this model is called constellation schema, where each fact table individually is a perfect star schema design because each one is related with a…
The DMVs are queries that allow you to retrieve valuable metadata information about your data model, server operations, and server health. What are the DMVs The DMVs queries are an interface to schema rowsets based on SQL and use a SELECT statement and the $System schema with an XML/A schema rowset, however, they do not support the full syntax of…
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]In this article, I explain how to set up an incremental refresh in Power BI, the benefits of apply this policy in your data models what are the requirements for it and the important considerations you have to consider. Step-by-step instructions to configure Incremental refresh Incremental refresh policies are defined in Power BI Desktop to…