Blog

Azure Databricks Notebooks combine live code in Python, SQL, Scala, or R with visualisations and markdown. Here's how to set them up, attach clusters, manage libraries, and integrate them into ADF/Synapse pipelines.

Explore Microsoft Fabric, inspired by Data Mesh, for a data-driven strategy. Learn to approach a Data Mesh vision using this powerful tool.

Explore Data Mesh's influence on Microsoft Fabric, addressing gaps in data product marketplace, standards, master data management, and governance.

Creating a successful organisation-wide data and analytics platform isn't just about architecture, schemas and semantic models. It's also about culture, organisational design and people. This blog explores the socio-technical nature of data and analytics and how this should influence your approach to adoption of Microsoft Fabric.

Explore the iterator design pattern in C#, its importance in programming, and learn how to implement it.

Explore the benefits of Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) in technical design, with real-world examples applied to different scenarios.

Explore AI-powered self-service reporting with tools like Copilot in Power BI and Microsoft Fabric, balancing benefits and pitfalls.

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 unifies Power BI, Data Factory & Data Lake on Synapse infrastructure, reducing cost & time while enabling citizen data science.

Explore OneLake, Microsoft Fabric's core storage for data in Azure & other clouds. Discover its role in Fabric workloads, the OneDrive equivalent for data storage.

In this Microsoft Fabric vs Synapse comparison we examine how features map from Azure Synapse to Fabric.

Microsoft Fabric unifies data & analytics, building on Azure Synapse Analytics for improved data-level interoperability. Explore its offerings & pros/cons.

Rx.NET v6.0 is here — the first major release in 2.5 years, supporting .NET 7, .NET 6, .NET Standard 2.0, and .NET Framework 4.7.2

Discover the use of Synapse Notebooks in Azure Synapse Analytics for data analysis, cleaning, visualization, and machine learning.

Explore how to implement source control in Databricks notebooks, promoting software engineering best practices.

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.

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 adds some new pattern matching features. In this post, Ian shows the new support for matching lists.

Learn about the thinking behind endjin's Power BI Maturity assessment by applying Wardley Doctrine, and asking more questions.

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

This blog shows how to transform a document based format to a tabular format whilst managing all the nested properties

Learn to configure AAD or MSA 2FA profiles for UI automation testing with Time-based One-Time Passwords.

Why you should make writing unit tests a regular practice and how they will improve your code. This blog explains how to write unit tests in PowerShell using Pester.

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

Implement Python data validation with Pandera & Great Expectations in this comparison of their features and use cases.