Video Transcription:
Hey, Paul, thanks for jumping on a call with me.
Hello, Eric. Good to see you.
Good to see you. Hey, I wanted to ask you a quick question. I noticed a new experience when I log into Power BI today and I’m brand new to it. So I wanted to call the expert and learn a little bit more about what is going on with this new experience here.
Well, I think that you’re probably talking about some things that show up in the Show All list down here. Exactly. Have a premium workspace.
Yep. Yeah, that is exactly. Yeah, this caught me by surprise.
So you know, I think that all of these objects here are probably very familiar to you as a Power BI expert. Yeah. Okay. Well, welcome to the wonderful world of Microsoft Fabric. So if we go down to the Shaw button, and this is this is on by default, in a premium workspace. And the good news is that they’re actually less expensive ways to enable the content that you’re about to see here. So if we go to show all so what was your reaction is, you saw these new objects.
I’ve heard about a lot of this, but I’ve never actually seen it all under one roof, so to speak. This looks like it’s going to open up a lot of really special capabilities. But I wanted to get your take on it.
First, a blog article that I posted a few months ago, this is really just about transforming data for Power BI, that kind of tells the story of what’s necessary to deliver an enterprise scale BI solution. Now, you’re, you’re a principal architect, you you lead teams, and you help architect large BI solutions. And I’m sure it’s not news to you that we’ve been telling the same story, and promoting the same architectural patterns for what, 30 years plus now in the industry. And, you know, and that is that regardless of the reporting tool that you use for BI it could be, you know, Crystal Reports, or SSRS, that we relied on data engineers to go build us a data warehouse with the data in the right shape, right.
Absolutely. Yeah. You know, that’s, I mean, that’s work that we’ve been doing for ever, and, you know, you look at at a large scale solution, this out of bring back some memories for you.
Absolutely my SSIs days good all that says, sure.
So as you know, as as a BI architect, we would essentially have to, you know, when a when a 3Cloud client would come to us and say, Hey, we, you know, we need you to, to help us tool out a BI architecture, what do we need, and we’d say, well, you’re gonna have to have a data Warehouse, or a Data Mart with your data is shaped in the right shape. And that requires an ETL process, and you got to stage things, build pipelines, and packages, think about this, as in the modern world. You know, here’s, here’s the version using synapse analytics, where we use a lakehouse architecture, with a bronze layer and a silver layer and a gold layer. And then we use like an ADF pipeline or synapse pipelines to transform, you know, the, the ELT processes, and that, that has to end up in in a relational database of some kind, right?
You know, think about the same thing in Databricks, same thing, we’ve got this lakehouse architecture, where we’re, we’re storing the data in parquet files and museum, you know, Delta lake, or you’re using Delta storage, there’s a spark engine, which, you know, we can scale out and cluster and, you know, again, using Delta Lake, and then we build Power BI on top of that. Now, today, think about what if, what if you never had to leave Power BI, and you had all of these capabilities, you had a lakehouse for storage, you have Jupyter Notebooks, and you could you could code in Python or PI Spark or PI SQL. And you’ve got data factory pipelines, you’ve got notebooks. You can create data science experiments, you create a data warehouse, and it resides in your Power BI workspace. Wow. Just think of how powerful that that that will be. Now, what do you think?
This is great, it’s clearly I’ve got a lot more to learn. So I have to figure that part out.
Well, in the good news is that, you know, first of all, you one person doesn’t have to play the part of the data engineer and the BI expert and the data scientist, but all of those cases abilities are available in the Microsoft Fabric platform, which really is an extension of Power BI next generation. And our colleagues at 3Cloud have recorded demonstration videos to introduce every single one of these components.
Oh, wow, that will be so helpful. Yeah, I’m going to need to learn a lot. It’s nice that every now now we’ve got everything, you know, as I mentioned, under one roof, so I don’t have to worry about installing 15 different applications on my machine.
And the great news is that if we’ve got engineers and data professionals who understand Jupyter Notebooks who understand you know, ADF pipelines, you know, who use use Python, maybe they have experience with all of those components in data bricks or in synapse analytics. All of those skills are applicable here. You don’t have to start over again.
No, no, you’re right. That’s huge. Well, hey, thank you so much. I always appreciate your input. And I’m gonna go watch some more videos.
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