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Agile teams often get their planning and priorities wrong

Agile teams often get their planning and priorities wrong

Matthew Adams

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: Announced

Ed Freeman

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?

What is OneLake?

Ed Freeman

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

Azure Synapse Analytics versus Microsoft Fabric: A Side by Side Comparison

Barry Smart

In this post we compare Azure Synapse Analytics with Microsoft Fabric to understand how features map from Synapse to Fabric.
Intro to Microsoft Fabric

Intro to Microsoft Fabric

Ed Freeman

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

Rx.NET v6.0 Now Available

Ian Griffiths

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

Notebooks in Azure Synapse Analytics

Jessica Hill

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

Version Control in Databricks

Elisenda Gascon

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

Exploring OpenChain: From License Compliance to Security Assurance

Charlotte Gayton

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

Using Cloud CI/CD in Zero Trust Environments

James Dawson

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 new features: Span<char> pattern matching

Ian Griffiths

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

Ask the right questions to get your data insights projects back on track

Matthew Adams

Learn about the thinking behind endjin's Power BI Maturity assessment by applying Wardley Doctrine, and asking more questions.
SQLbits 2023 - The Best Bits

SQLbits 2023 - The Best Bits

Barry Smart

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