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Tag Archive: Fabric

  • Fabric Capacity Smoothing: Why This Morning’s Job Is Slowing This Afternoon’s Reports

    November 5th, 2026 in Blog, Fabric

    It’s 2pm on a Tuesday. Reports that normally load in a couple of seconds are crawling, a few users are complaining and the obvious question gets asked: what’s running right now? You check, and the answer is… not much at all. The capacity looks quiet. The culprit turns out to be a large semantic model refresh that ran at 6am and finished hours ago. If you’ve been in that situation, or had a support ticket like it land in…

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  • FabCon Europe 2026: What Fabric IQ, Foundry and Agents Mean for Data Engineers

    October 12th, 2026 in AI, Azure, Blog, Data Lakehouse, Fabric, Foundry

    The biggest AI story from Barcelona wasn’t a model announcement. It was Microsoft making the case that agents are only as good as the data and definitions beneath them, which puts data engineering at the centre of the AI conversation. Here’s a quick map of the names, from the data layer up: Fabric: ingest, transform, store, govern and serve data. Home turf. Fabric IQ: business context (entities, measures, relationships) on top of your data…

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  • FabCon Europe 2026: News from Barcelona!

    October 6th, 2026 in Blog, Community, Fabric, Microsoft Fabric

    Last week me and the team were in Barcelona for FabCon Europe, alongside nearly 5,000 other data professionals. This year’s keynote had a clear message: Fabric is now the context for AI Microsoft’s pitch focused on Microsoft IQ (Work, Foundry, Web and Fabric IQ). Fabric IQ is the bit we care about. OneLake data, semantic model measures, ontologies and real-time signals, combined into something agents can reason over. Data flows in…

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  • One Week to Go Until FabFest 2026!

    One Week to Go Until FabFest 2026!October 6th, 2026 in Community, Microsoft Fabric

    It’s nearly time! Next week, October 15, FabFest 2026 arrives at Millennium Point in Birmingham, bringing together the Microsoft data community for a full day of Microsoft Fabric and AI. Hosted by Purple Frog’s Joe Billingham, Lewis Prince and Hollie Whittles, FabFest is all about bringing the community together to learn, share ideas and hear practical insights from people working with the technology every day. And there are now just a…

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  • Running Fabric Pipelines from a Notebook

    September 17th, 2026 in Blog, Fabric

    Everyone knows the easy direction: drop a Notebook activity into a pipeline, and the pipeline waits for it to finish before moving on. The reverse, a notebook kicking off a pipeline and waiting for success or failure, is less documented. Here’s a working pattern for that: trigger the pipeline you want to run, monitor it at the activity level rather than just the top-level job status, and raise on failure. For the rest of this post, treat…

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  • There Is More Than One Way to Query Your Data: Have You Tried DAX?

    June 12th, 2026 in Blog, Data analytics, DAX

    Power BI is fantastic for building reports, but sometimes you just need to get data out of a semantic model quickly, without building a full report page to do it. However, what if you need to dig further into a specific snapshot of your data? For example: What if you wanted to pull a precise slice of data into Excel for a one-off analysis? Or maybe you’re building a bespoke report and want to make sure it’s using the same agreed…

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  • Baking Up Better Data: Microsoft Fabric and the Fabric Toolbox

    May 8th, 2026 in Blog, Community, Data Factory, Data Warehouse, Fabric, Microsoft Fabric

    Recently, I presented a talk at the Birmingham Data User Group, titled “Stop Hand-Whisking Your Data: Faster Fabric Development with the fabric-toolbox”. On the back of that, I wanted to summarise the talk into a blog and share how you can use fabric-toolbox to enhance your Fabric development. Data engineering can feel abstract. Layers upon layers of transformation, movement, and logic that are hard to visualise at a glance. So, when talking…

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  • Time Travel in Microsoft Fabric Warehouses

    May 7th, 2026 in Blog, Data Warehouse, Fabric, Warehouse

    Have you ever wished you could see what your data looked like last Tuesday? With time travel in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse, you can! Time travel in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse provides the ability to query your data exactly as it existed at any point within the last 30 days, without maintaining separate historical snapshots or copies. Fabric Warehouse is built on Delta Lake, which records every insert, update, and delete as a new version in the…

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  • Stop Writing the Morning Trading Report, Automate It with AI

    April 1st, 2026 in AI, Blog, Fabric

    The Morning Ritual Nobody Loves Every morning in retail, somewhere between 8am and 10am, someone pulls yesterday’s sales figures, checks the weather, tries to recall which promotion was running, consults the calendar for bank holidays, paydays, school terms or other significant trading periods and then drafts a few paragraphs for the leadership team. It is usually rushed and almost always takes longer than it should. What if it simply…

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  • Microsoft Fabric FabCon 2026 announcements that will transform your data stack

    March 25th, 2026 in Blog, Community, Microsoft Fabric, News, Power BI

    What Microsoft just revealed about the future of enterprise analytics… Microsoft’s FabCon 2026 conference unveiled a transformative vision for enterprise data and AI integration. Rather than incremental improvements to existing tools, the announcements represent a fundamental architectural shift. Fabric is evolving from a passive data platform into an active intelligence layer that drives real-time, autonomous decision-making across…

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