Weekly Data Round-up 02

Here are the latest announcements and community blog posts from the first week of November that have been essential reading and viewing.

Azure Synapse Analytics

• Performance optimized delimited text parser for external tables – You can now use the option PARSER_VERSION = ‘2.0’ for performance improvements when creating external tables in SQL Serverless over delimited text data, which is a good thing! Read more.
• Automatic schema discovery for delimited text files – You can now exclude the WITH statement to automatically map a schema when querying delimited text files, this means that the data types will be infered rather than needing to be explicitly stated. Read more.

Data Factory

• ADF adds Cached Lookups to data flows to make your ETL jobs faster and much simpler – Now Azure Data Factory will cache lookup data to make lookups much more efficient. Mark Kromer (@KromerBigData) shows off this new feature. Read more.

Databricks

• From data warehousing to data lakes in 40 minutes – A brand new podcast series called Data Brew from the sparksters over at Databricks has been released this week with the first episode focusing on the concept of the data lakehouse. The data lakehouse seeks to bring functionality from the data warehouse to data lake technology, an essential listen. Read more.

Community

• Why You Should Use DAX Studio With Power BI – If you’re not using DAX Studio then you should be! Patrick Leblanc (@patrickdba) dives into using DAX Studio with Power BI over on the Guy In A Cube YouTube channel here.
• Power BI & Synapse Part 1 – The Art of (im)possible! – Nikola Ilic (@DataMozart) has started a series on Power BI with Azure Synapse Analytics. This first post gives a great background on Data Warehousing history and evolution before diving into the Synapse Studio for a hands-on demo. Be on the lookout for more in Nikola’s series. Read more.
• Geospatial Analysis With Azure Data Explorer, Power BI And Dynamic M Parameters – If you love Power BI, Geospacial Analysis and can access Azure Data Explorer then Chris Webb (@cwebb_bi) has a blog post for you. Chris takes us through an example using the new Dynamic M Parameters feature in Power BI. Read more.

Certifications

• Microsoft are still offering their exam discount for those affected by Covid. Read more about the offer here which reduces the cost of an exam to around $15.