Microsoft Build 2026 announcements
Once again there were a number of Microsoft Build announcements related to data and AI, and some were very impressive. Below are my favorites. I am prioritizing the data...
2026-06-18
44 reads
James Serra's Blog
Microsoft Purview data governance best practices
Microsoft Purview can be the best data governance tool in the world, but it will still be useless if people do not know it exists, do not trust the...
2026-06-04
46 reads
Deciphering Data Architectures Is Now Available in Multiple Languages
Since the release of my book Deciphering Data Architectures: Choosing Between a Modern Data Warehouse, Data Fabric, Data Lakehouse, and Data Mesh, I’ve been fortunate to hear from readers...
2026-06-02
14 reads
Understanding Fabric Ontology
What problem is Fabric Ontology trying to solve? For years, most data conversations have started with tables. We ask where the data lives, what columns are available, how the...
2026-06-10 (first published: 2026-05-20)
289 reads
Understanding Fabric MCP
Model Context Protocol, or MCP, is one of those technical ideas that sounds more complicated than it really is. The easiest way to think about it is this: MCP...
2026-05-20 (first published: 2026-05-04)
434 reads
GenAI vs Dashboards: Not the Same (And Never Will Be)
There’s a question I’ve been hearing more and more lately, especially as Copilot, Fabric, and Fabric data agents become part of everyday conversations with customers: will GenAI replace reports...
2026-05-06 (first published: 2026-04-23)
323 reads
The OneLake catalog in Fabric: Explore, Govern, Secure
Once your Fabric tenant grows past a few workspaces, data discovery gets weird fast. Duplicates multiply. People stop trusting what they find. And security teams start hearing things like,...
2026-04-14
25 reads
Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference
A ton of new features for Microsoft Fabric were announced at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference (FabCon Atlanta 26) last week (see the FabCon keynote here). There were 8000 attendees! Here...
2026-04-08 (first published: 2026-03-26)
1,226 reads
T-SQL Tuesday #196 Roundup: What career risks have you taken?
I hosted this month’s T-SQL Tuesday invitation in which I asked, “What career risks have you taken?” I got some great responses which I’ll recap here, Career risks? Rob...
2026-03-17
6 reads
Semantic Model Power Query vs Dataflow Gen2 in Fabric
In my recent blog post, Building Power BI Reports: Desktop vs Fabric, I talked about the evolving authoring experience in Microsoft Fabric and how report development is increasingly moving...
2026-03-09
53 reads
Blogs
Five Ways Redshift Serverless Quietly Eats Your Budget
It is Friday, the queries are running, and nobody is watching the bill. That...
A Career of Memories
By Steve Jones
Annabel retired from Redgate Software this week. Across most of my career at Redgate,...
Rethinking Index Maintenance: Why avg_fragmentation_in_percent Is Outdated and What You Should Do Instead
By Tim Radney
As a SQL Server DBA with years of experience tuning production environments, I’ve seen...
Forums
Midjourney, Healthcare?
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Changes, Happiness, and a Few Tears
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Changes, Happiness, and a Few...
BCP on Linux
Comments posted to this topic are about the item BCP on Linux
Question of the Day
BCP on Linux
When running bcp on Linux, what is the field terminator?
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