You Don’t Have a Fabric Problem. You Have a Workload Problem.
Why comparing Microsoft Fabric data stores never gets you to a decision – and the six questions that do. Somebody on your team asks a reasonable question at the start of a Fabric project: where should the data actually live? There are four answers. A SQL Database. A Warehouse. A Lakehouse. An Eventhouse. Every one…
AI Does Not Fix Wrong Judgment
Lately, I have been reflecting on something very important in the middle of all this excitement around AI. A lot of people believe that once you start using AI, your work automatically becomes better. Your answers become smarter. Your decisions become sharper. Your problem-solving becomes stronger. But that is not true. AI can definitely make…
Architecting the “Frontier Firm” with Microsoft 365 Copilot and AI Agents
Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are reshaping business models, customer expectations, and decision-making at an unprecedented speed. For leadership, the mandate is no longer about driving incremental improvements; it is about fundamentally rethinking how organizations operate. The pressure to evolve is a present-day reality. Currently, 80% of the global workforce reports lacking the time or energy…
Smart Pipelines Orchestration: Designing Predictable Data Platforms on Shared Spark
The Efficiency Paradox in Mature Platforms In the evolution of modern data platforms, the primary challenge has shifted. In the early days, the hurdle was simply scaling compute power to handle massive datasets. Today, however, scaling compute is rarely the bottleneck. Shared, elastic Spark pools—such as those found in Azure Synapse or Microsoft Fabric—already provide…
The AI Agent Showdown: Microsoft Copilot Studio vs. Azure AI Foundry
Deciding between Low-Code Speed and Pro-Code Power In the rapidly evolving world of Microsoft AI, two names constantly surface when organizations want to build custom “copilots” and agents: Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft (Azure) AI Foundry. At first glance, they seem to share the same goal: enabling businesses to build intelligent, task-oriented AI solutions. However,…
Maximizing Accuracy in Microsoft Fabric: Best Practices for Data Agent Semantic Models
As organizations move toward conversational systems using generative AI, the ability to ask natural language questions of your data is becoming a game-changer. The Fabric data agent enables this by connecting Power BI semantic models as data sources, allowing users to receive accurate answers without writing complex SQL or DAX queries. However, the “magic” of…
The Great Reversal: Why AI Isn’t Replacing Developers (Yet)
It wasn’t long ago that the tech world was flooded with predictions of the “end of coding.” In 2023, forecasts claimed that artificial intelligence would replace up to 80% of developers by 2025. The narrative was clear: AI co-workers were coming, and human programmers were on their way out. However, as we approach the dates…
The End of Data Silos: A Comprehensive Guide to Microsoft Fabric’s End-to-End Architecture
In the traditional enterprise data landscape, organizations often struggle with a “fragmented” estate. You might have one service for data ingestion, a separate data lake for storage, a different data warehouse for SQL analytics, and a completely isolated environment for data science. This leads to brittle integration, data duplication, and governance challenges. According to the…
Analyze in Excel – the Advanced Methodology
A common ask from users is the ability to view data related to visuals in excel. While there is an option to export data, the format is often unfriendly and has limitations. What’s more, this data becomes disconnected and is not updated if a user looks at after the data is refreshed. This post will…
From Craftsman to Curator: Reclaiming Your Mastery in an Automated World
It started with a rush. Like many of us, I remember the first time I fed a complex problem to an AI assistant and watched it spit out a working solution in seconds. It felt like I’d just discovered a superpower. The hours I used to spend wrestling with boilerplate code or searching for a…
Using Visual Studio Code with Power BI
You can do much more with TOM than simply print a list of tables or update measures. This article is just the first of a series of posts I plan to write describing some of the more useful things you might like to try, such as: I’m not suggesting or recommending this approach should be…