Weekly Data Round-up 04 – 27/11/2020

A much anticipated feature for Azure Synapse Analytics has been released, Power BI Administrators get new data export settings, and there are new learning opportunities across Data Factory and Databricks in this week’s data roundup.

Power BI

• New export settings are available in the Power BI admin portal – Power BI Administrators looking for more granular control in data export settings have been given new options within the Power BI Admin portal. Read more.

Synapse Analytics

• Source Control Integration – A much anticipated feature is now available within Azure Synapse Analytics Studio, source control integration via Git. Currently supported providers are Azure DevOps and GitHub. Read more.

Data Factory

• How to Handle SQL DB Row-level Errors in ADF Data Flows – There’s new functionality within Data Factory Mapping Data Flows which elegantly handles errors when inserting into Azure SQL Database. Read more.
• New Data Factory Modules added to Microsoft Learn – New Learn modules focusing on Orchestration, SSIS (Integration Services), and Monitoring/Operationalizing your ADF jobs have been added to the Microsoft Learn portal within the Data integration at scale with Azure Data Factory learning path. This adds around 2 hours of content to this series. Read more.

Databricks

• Data + AI Summit Europe – If you missed or would like to catch-up on the sessions from the Data + AI Summit Europe then there are 125+ sessions still available to view covering topics such as What’s New in Apache Spark 3.0, Adaptive Query Execution: Speeding Up Spark SQL at Runtime and Common Strategies for Improving Performance on Your Delta Lakehouse. Read more.
• Free training Two-part series – Introduction to Lakehouse and SQL Analytics – With the recent public preview of the new Databricks SQL Analytics service, there are free training sessions available in December. Read more.

Datahai Blog

• Creating a Power BI solution using Dataflows for Aggregations – A walkthrough of a solution which uses a Power BI Dataflow as the source for an aggregations table in a Power BI model, which also includes a DirectQuery connection to an Azure SQL Database. Read more. This blog post is also available as a YouTube video here.
• Harnessing Azure Synapse Analytics SQL Serverless in Power BI Dataflows – This blog post walks through using the new Azure Synapse Analytics SQL Serverless engine to load a Power BI Dataflow from an Azure Data Lake Gen2 storage account. How does the performance stack up against the native connector? Find out more here.

Community

• Power BI Dataflow – New Diagram View – Microsoft MVP Laura Graham-Brown (@Laura_GB) brings us another great entry in the Power BI Dataflows series with a look at the new Visual Data Prep feature in Dataflows. Read more.
• Power BI & Synapse Part 5 – Conquering Cosmos DB ! – In Part 5 of Nikola’s excellent series on Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI the focus is very much on CosmosDB integration. Nikola works through a practical solution using the new link between Azure Synapse Analytics and CosmosDB’s analytical store. Read more.
• Mapping Data Flows Performance – Mapping Data Flows uses Spark and Databricks under the covers, in this video Mark Kromer (@KromerBihttps://twitter.com/KromerBigDatagData) takes us through some performance analysis and advice on cluster usage during debugging and production use.
• Azure Synapse Analytics Source Control – There’s not one but two recent videos from Mark Pryce-Maher (@MarkPM_MSFT) and Simon Whiteley (@MrSiWhiteley) on the new Git integration functionality in Azure Synapse Analytics. Check out Mark’s video here and Simon’s video here.