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Agile teams often get their planning and priorities wrong
Do you struggle to manage conflicting demands from multiple stakeholders, even when they have agreed about the relative priority of their requests? Apply a budgeting methodology to agile projects for better planning and communication with the team and wider stakeholders.

Microsoft Fabric: Announced
Microsoft Fabric extends the promise of Azure Synapse integration to all analytics workloads from the data engineer to the business knowledge worker. It brings together Power BI, Data Factory, and the Data Lake, on a new generation of the Synapse data infrastructure. Delivered as a unified SaaS offering, it aims to reduce cost and time to value, while enabling new "citizen data science" capabilities. Check out all the resources from the endjin team collated in this post.

What is OneLake?
OneLake is the core of Microsoft Fabric - it is essentially the storage account for all of your data utilized within Fabric, be that within Azure or from another cloud (through Shortcuts). As the name suggests, it is a single, logical data lake backing more or less all of your Fabric workloads. For fans of analogies: you'll have probably heard Microsoft use the tag-line "OneLake is to data what OneDrive is to files/documents". Read this blog to dive deeper into OneLake and learn about why you should be excited.

Azure Synapse Analytics versus Microsoft Fabric: A Side by Side Comparison
In this post we compare Azure Synapse Analytics with Microsoft Fabric to understand how features map from Synapse to Fabric.

Intro to Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft Fabric is a unified data & analytics platform that brings together, and improves upon, Microsoft's existing suite of data products. It can be thought of as the third generation of Microsoft data platforms, where first generation (e.g. HDInsight, SQL Data Warehouse) were somewhat isolated takes on traditional data products; second generation was Azure Synapse Analytics, which integrated platforms at a UX level but still felt a little disjointed at the data level; and now we have Microsoft Fabric which builds upon the Synapse "unification" vision, with a particular focus on enabling deep data-level interoperability. In this post we introduce its core offerings, as well as weigh up the pros and cons of this new product.

Rx.NET v6.0 Now Available
For the first time since 2020, a new release of Rx.NET is available, supporting .NET 6 and .NET 7.

Notebooks in Azure Synapse Analytics
This blog post explores interactive notebooks in Azure Synapse Analytics. A Synapse Notebook is a powerful data science tool that can be utilised in a variety of contexts including exploratory data analysis, data cleaning and transformation, data visualisation, statistical modeling and machine learning.

Version Control in Databricks
Databricks notebooks provide an interactive and collaborative environment for developing code while applying software engineering best practices, such as source control. This blog post provides a step by step guide of how to implement source control in Databricks.

Exploring OpenChain: From License Compliance to Security Assurance
Open-source software has become an essential part of many organisation's software supply chain, however, this poses challenges with license compliance and security assurance.

Using Cloud CI/CD in Zero Trust Environments
Performing certain deployment operations from a cloud-based CI/CD agent against resources that are only accessible via private networking are problematic. The often-cited solution is to use your own hosted agents that are also connected to the same private networks, however, this introduces additional costs and maintenance overhead. This post discusses an approach that combines the use of cloud-based CI/CD agents with 'just-in-time' allow-listing as an alternative to operating your own private agents.

C# 11.0 new features: Span<char> pattern matching
C# 11.0 adds some new pattern matching features. In this post, Ian shows the new support for matching lists.

Ask the right questions to get your data insights projects back on track
Learn about the thinking behind endjin's Power BI Maturity assessment by applying Wardley Doctrine, and asking more questions.

SQLbits 2023 - The Best Bits
This is a summary of the sessions I attended at SQLbits 2023 in Newport Wales, which is Europe's largest expert led data conference.