Azure Weekly

Issue #449 - 14th January 2024

Welcome to issue 449 of Azure Weekly, the first edition of 2024, which, quite staggeringly is the 10th year of publication!

After a break of a month, this edition is absolutely heaving; there are a fair number of retrospective posts; it's amazing to see how much Azure services and developer tooling has improved over the past year - the power of iterative and incremental change really does make an impact, even over a relatively short timespan. There are a few announcements, but the majority of the content is articles and how-to's.

2023 seemed to be the year that AI became mainstream and "AI / Copilot all the things" started in earnest. If you look at this edition, the AI & Machine Learning section ~40 articles, but because AI is being pervasively integrated into so many services, it's also spread across the other sections too. And with Microsoft Fabric going GA late last year, there's an equal amount of articles in the Analytics section too.

In the last few weeks before the festive break I was inundated with requests for briefings from CxO's and Technical Decision Makers which broadly fell into two camps: "What should we be doing with AI?" and "Should we bet on Microsoft Fabric as our strategic data platform?". Two weeks into 2024 and that trend is continuing.

I did want to highlight that Ed Freeman produced two more videos in his excellent "Microsoft Fabric end-to-end demo" series, this time focusing on the Silver layer; first the theory Role of the Silver Layer in the Medallion Architecture and then the practice: Processing Bronze to Silver using Fabric Notebooks. Jess Hill has also been busy sharing learnings about Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse: How to access choice labels from Azure Synapse Link for Dataverse with PySpark and with SQL.

I hope you enjoy this edition - it may take you a couple of cups of your favourite beverage to get through it all.