The Latest in Data and AI
Category: Data
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AI-Ready Data Governance in Microsoft Fabric with Purview
AI succeeds or fails on the trustworthiness of its data. In Microsoft Fabric, governance isn’t a layer added at the end—it’s the connective tissue that binds ingestion, transformation, analytics, and model consumption into a verifiable system of record. Purview provides the policy brain; Fabric provides the execution spine. Done well, governance here is not a…
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Fabric Mirroring: The Fine Print That Derails Pilots
The promise of zero-ETL is tantalizing: connect your live systems to Microsoft Fabric’s OneLake, and downstream analytics and models just see fresh data without you having to build and maintain tedious pipelines. In early proofs of concept, that idea often works well. But when teams scale toward full pilots or production, hidden limits and schema…
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Zero-ETL in Practice: Fabric Mirroring patterns that cut pipeline toil by 60%
“Zero-ETL” isn’t a promise that transformation disappears; it’s a shift in where the heavy lifting happens. Instead of building and babysitting brittle copy jobs, the platform continuously reflects source changes into your analytics lake—so teams spend more time modeling for the business and less time fighting pipelines. What Mirroring actually is (and isn’t) Microsoft Fabric…
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Tackling Data Silos with Fabric’s Medallion Best Practices
There’s a reason so many AI and analytics programs stall after promising pilots. The problem isn’t the model; it’s the mess beneath it — duplicated extracts, undocumented transformations, and business definitions that mutate from team to team. Data silos aren’t just an architectural nuisance; they’re an organizational tax on speed, trust, and outcomes. A Medallion…
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An Actionable Guide to Adopting Medallion Architecture with Fabric
Most data platforms don’t fail because of tooling. They stall because raw, messy inputs are rushed straight into analytics, each team patches problems locally, and every dashboard bakes in a different truth. The Medallion Architecture fixes this by introducing deliberate layers of quality—Bronze (raw), Silver (cleaned/standardized), Gold (business-ready)—and by making ownership and change management explicit.…
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Connecting AI Agents to Microsoft Fabric with GraphQL + MCP
TL;DR: Microsoft Fabric’s built-in API for GraphQL plus the Model Context Protocol (MCP) let organisations safely attach conversational AI agents to the organisation’s canonical data estate, delivering faster business insights, shorter time-to-value, and governed automation. For CIOs, this is less about one off experiments and more about a repeatable platform pattern: Unified data (OneLake) →…
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Data Factory in Fabric (Aug 2025): The upgrades you should actually use
TL;DR August brings four Data Factory upgrades that remove orchestration friction and lower time-to-value for governed ingestion in Fabric: Related platform update worth noting: On-premises Data Gateway (Aug 2025) adds features that help Fabric pipelines—e.g., Lakehouse connector, data consistency improvements in Copy Activity, and Entra ID support for PostgreSQL. Why these matter (business value, not…
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How Customer Managed Keys (CMKs) help Compliance in Microsoft Fabric
TL;DR Microsoft Fabric now lets you encrypt selected workspaces with your own keys in Azure Key Vault (CMK). You keep ownership of the cryptographic root of trust—rotation, audit, and revocation—on top of Microsoft’s default encryption. Practically, that means fewer audit exceptions, clearer incident response, and a stronger data-governance story when rolling Fabric out at scale.…
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How Fabric’s new Azure Databricks mirroring speeds up Enterprise Adoption
Microsoft Fabric now lets you mirror Azure Databricks Unity Catalog (UC) into OneLake. That means BI teams can build Power BI Direct Lake models over your existing Delta tables, without copying data and you get an auto-generated SQL analytics endpoint for ad-hoc analysis. Net effect: weeks-to-days onboarding for Fabric, while your engineering and ML stay…