This post is about module 7 in the Cloud Skills challenge.

Previous posts in this series:

Microsoft Learn Module

Get started with data warehouses in Microsoft Fabric

  • This module is about data warehouses, and how users can transition from the "lake view" of the Lakehouse to T-SQL experiences similar to traditional data warehouses.
  • The exercise for this module has you creating a data warehouse, creating tables and inserting data with T-SQL commands, defining the data model and relationships between the tables, creating an SQL view, and querying the data via SQL or the new-ish Visual Query functionality. The end of the exercise has you creating some basic visualizations in a Power BI report interface.

This was another amazing session, with Angela (Henry) and Chris (Wagner) covering a lot of information and some bonus conversations included to expand on some of the concepts. Like Session 5, these two were a great pairing, they happened to have known each other for years and it showed in the training.

Key Takeaways

Fabric's data warehouse supports full T-SQL capabilities which is something I am very familiar with and comfortable with. The "limitation" is the data warehouse cannot hold unstructured data but that's where other data transformation tools may come in as the base for the data warehouse is the Lakehouse that can support unstructured data. Queries can be done across both Lakehouse and Warehouse tables, with Spark or T-SQL, where in the Lakehouse alone, Spark SQL is an option that is similar to T-SQL but not 100% the same.

This session resonated a lot more with me with the background I have, vs. some of the earlier sessions which covered technologies and tools that are new to me (Notebooks, Python, Spark).