Data Lake on Sam Debruyn

Fabric: Lakehouse or Data Warehouse?

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 10:24:43 +0200

There are 2 kinds of companies currently active in the Microsoft data space: those who are migrating to Microsoft Fabric, and those who will soon be planning their migration to Microsoft Fabric. 😅 One question that often comes back is

Should I focus on the Lakehouse or the Data Warehouse?

Let’s answer that in this post. I can already tell you this: you’re asking the wrong question 😉

Is Microsoft Fabric just a rebranding?

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 10:53:24 +0200

It’s a question I see popping up every now and then. Is Microsoft Fabric just a rebranding of existing Azure services like Synapse, Data Factory, Event Hub, Stream Analytics, etc.? Is it something more? Or is it something entirely new?

I hate clickbait titles as much as you do. So, before we dive in, let me answer the question right away. No, Fabric is not just a rebranding. I would not even describe Fabric as an evolution (as Microsoft often does), but rather as a revolution! Now, let’s find out why.

My take-aways from Big Data London: Delta Lake & the open lakehouses

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 10:20:35 +0100

Last week I attended Big Data London. Both days were filled with interesting sessions, mostly focussing on one of the vendors also exhibiting at the conference. There are 2 things I am taking away from this conference: Delta Lake has won the data format wars, and your next data platform is either Snowflake, either an open Lakehouse.

How to use service principal authentication to access Microsoft Fabric's OneLake

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 10:28:11 +0200

Microsoft recently added support to authenticate to OneLake using service principals and managed identities. This allows users to access OneLake from applications without having to use a user account. Let’s see how this works.

Microsoft Fabric's Auto Discovery: a closer look

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0200

In previous posts , I dug deeper into Microsoft Fabric’s SQL-based features and we even explored OneLake using Azure Storage Explorer . In this post, I’ll take a closer look at Fabric’s auto-discovery feature using Shortcuts. Auto-discovery, what’s that?

Fabric’s Lakehouses can automatically discover all the datasets already present in your data lake and expose these as tables in Lakehouses (and Warehouses).

Cool, right? At the time of writing, there is a single condition: the tables must be stored in the Delta Lake format. Let’s take a closer look.

Exploring OneLake with Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 09:30:57 +0200

Recap: OneLake & Delta Lake

One of the coolest things about Microsoft Fabric is that it nicely decouples storage and compute and it is very transparent about the storage: everything ends up in the OneLake. This is a huge advantage over other data platforms since you don’t have to worry about moving data around, it is always available, wherever you need it.

Welcome to the 3rd generation: SQL in Microsoft Fabric

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 20:15:11 +0200

While typing this blog post, I’m flying back from the Data Platform Next Step conference where I gave a talk about using dbt with Microsoft Fabric . DP Next Step was the first conference focussed on Microsoft data services right after the announcement of Microsoft Fabric so a lot of speakers were Microsoft employees and most of the talks had some Fabric content.

Fabric Fabric Fabric, what is it all about? In this post I’ll go deeper into what it is, why you should care and focus specifically on the SQL aspect of Fabric.

dbt & Fabric: better together

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I gave a talk at the Data Platform Next Step conference in Billund, Denmark. The conference was the first conference with sessions about Microsoft Fabric right after the launch of the public preview at Microsoft Build .

dbt is the new data transformation tool taking the world by storm. It lowers the barrier of entry into the world of data analytics to everyone who ever wrote a line of SQL. Did you know it integrates quite well with all Microsoft SQL products and even with Fabric? Join this session to follow in the footsteps of thousands of analytics engineers and fall in love with dbt. Learn more about how dbt works with Fabric and Azure SQL from the maintainer of the official dbt adapter! We’ll use Fabric and VS Code to build our first Hello Fabric project.

Deploy a data lake on Azure in less than an hour

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This talk was given on multiple occasions:

During a lunch webinar at dataroots .
At Data Science Leuven (event details ).

A data lake is fundamental to a modern big data approach so it’s important to set it up the right way. But how can you do that without having to spend hours on research and then losing days configuring every component of the data lake? How can you gain a lot of time, while still deploying a fully functional data lake with all the necessary components?

Fabric training programs

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using Microsoft Fabric since early 2023 and have been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award specifically for Fabric. I have a deep understanding of the platform and its capabilities, and I’m excited to share my knowledge with you. I’ve worked out several training programs that can help you and your team get started with Fabric, or to deepen your knowledge of the platform.