Wednesday, 30 April 2025

MS Fabric OneLake Shortcuts

 "Shortcuts in Microsoft OneLake allow you to unify your data across domains, clouds, and accounts by creating a single virtual data lake for your entire enterprise.MS Learn

It allows open storage format data to be stored in the source system, metadata is added to OneLake, and the data can be queried; the load is predominantly performed against the source system, e.g., Dataverse/Dynamics.

Clarification: A shortcut is automatically added to MS Fabric for each Dataverse.  Dataverse creates Parquet files (est 5-10% extra data storage, counts against Dataverse storage).  Via the shortcut, report writers or data engineers can access the Dataverse data as though it is inside MS Fabric's OneLake.

Understand: Dataverse creates Parquet files that MS Fabric can look at to generate dataset data.

"Shortcuts are objects in OneLake that point to other storage locations.MS Learn

External shortcuts (data is held at the source system) supports any open format storage format, including: 

  • Apache Iceberg Tables via Snowflake,
  • Parquet files on SnowFlake,
  • Microsoft Dataverse
  • Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS), 
  • Google Cloud Storage, 
  • Databricks, 
  • Amazon S3 (including Iceberg tables),
  • Apache Spart (Iceberg)
Internal shortcuts supported:
  • SQL Databases: Connect to SQL databases within the Fabric environment.
  • Lakehouses: Reference data within different lakehouses.
  • Warehouses: Reference data stored in data warehouses.
  • Kusto Query Language (KQL) Databases: Connect to data stored in KQL databases.
  • Mirrored Azure Databricks Catalogs: Access data from mirrored Databricks catalogs.
I think these are also Internal shortcuts:
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • MongoDB

Tuesday, 29 April 2025

PowerBI reporting against ProjectWise (Project Insights)

Overview: Integration with Bentley is fairly complex but the project ProjectWise Project Insights provides a Power BI Custom Connector.  The connector is not certified by Microsoft but it can be used for gaining reporting insights.

Introduction to ProjectWise's Project Insights

These are the instructions I followed and it still works

Power BI report - Simple - Using ProjectWise Project Insights                                        

ProjectWise Posts:

Introduction to ProjectWise and BIM

ProjectWise from Bentley - extend with Powershell

Postman Collection to connect to Bentley's REST API for ProjectWise (WSG)

PowerBI reporting against ProjectWise (Project Insights) - This post

Postman Collection to connect to Bentley's REST API for ProjectWise (WSG)

Overview: Here is a short recording showing how to connect postman to ProjectWise's API's (WSG).

Here is the postman collection: Tutorial on connecting to ProjectWise APIs using Postman

A short video (1.5min) if you want to play with the two endpoint I used:


ProjectWise Posts by me:

Introduction to ProjectWise and BIM

ProjectWise from Bentley - extend with Powershell

Postman Collection to connect to Bentley's REST API for ProjectWise (WSG) (this post)

Power BI reporting against ProjectWise (Project Insights) 

Sunday, 13 April 2025

Mendix - Logging & Tracing

Mendix offers a few integrations with various Application and Performance Monitoring (APM) tools.

There is no integration with Azure Monitor.  The closest I have is log files can be downloaded.

Cloud edition allows you to download the log files.

TBC

Friday, 28 March 2025

Power BI Premium to MS Fabric Primer

Power BI Premium allows all users in your enterprise to consume (use) reports, you buy licences separately for the report builders.

Two methods of getting report data: Import Mode (data is not live/real-time, and retrieval is fast) & Direct Query Mode (real-time data, but retrieval is slow)

All Power BI Premium subscriptions will automatically become MS Fabric during 2025. 

Direct Lake Mode

An additional method of querying, "Direct Lake Mode," combines the best aspects of both old methods for retrieving data.  Direct Lake Mode (real-time and fast data retrieval).

OneLake

  • Storage is in Delta Parquet 
  • Data is stored once, along with permissions, when copied into Fabric; the individual Lakehouses, warehouses, and transformations still rely on the original Parquet file data.
  • Shortcuts create a virtual pointer to a variety of data types such as Snowflake, ADSL, ...

Great Visual Descriptions of the 3 options: Comprehensive Guide to Direct Lake Datasets in Microsoft Fabric

Tuesday, 18 March 2025

Copilots Explained

GitHub Copilot

Code Copilots: GitHub Copilot extensions in VS and VS Code.  Amazon Q Developer is an AWS code generator best for building code/ and solutions.  GitHub comes in 3 flavours: individual, Business and Enterprise.

GitHub explains code, optimises your code's performance, improves readability, generates unit tests, improves error handling, adds new code with requested functionality, ensures coding consistency, and improves modularisation to help with the DRY principle.

GitHub is the diggity bomb.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat (Is Free)

Basically, just allows access to ChatGPT-4 with web content

Microsoft 365 Copilot (+£20/month if bought as an add-on)  I believe it is also referred to as Microsoft 365 Copilot Pro

Copilot is grounded in the business data you have access to in your enterprise.
Inline copilots, including grounded business data inside the office applications.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI-powered Agent that assists with Microsoft 365 apps like Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel, and Teams. It leverages large language models (GPT-4 and GPT-4Pro) and your enterprise data through the Microsoft Graph.  To work with M365 Copilot, you need the M365 Copilot license, which is pricy, marked at $30 per user per month.  Access to Copilot studio

Copilots in M365

Optimise results by preparing content!  Like docx, pptx and pdf files.  PDF, DOCX, XLSX (kindof), PPTX. Also works on csv, text, html, md files and wav audio files.  Supported file type.

Microsoft Copilot does not allow uploading images/pictures like ChatGPT does as of March 2025, but I don't doubt it is coming.  ChatGPT also can redraw (using DALLe)

RAG - Retrieval-Augmentation Generation basically indexes data into a Vector Index. Then, users can ask questions of the data source, and it retrieves the data in a formatted way for the requesting user.

RAG Explained.

Retrieval  - query the index/Knowledge source (Vector index)

Source/Vector Index supporting AI (body on knowledge to use)

RAG Grounding - is where accuracy is improved by anchoring the model's output to verify correct information.  Stop hallucinations.

Note/Thoughts:

  • Index SharePoint documents in the Copilot can be in German or about 100 languages, and I can ask for them in English or other languages.
  • Best to keep the source documents short.  
  • Copilots in SPO love formatting, i.e., title and header.
  • It does not read doc files but limits itself to the main document types. I need to verify this, as it seems wrong.
  • Folders have no influence on Vector Search results. They are helpful in choosing sources and managing content but have no effect on vector databases.
  • Neither does the depth of a document inside folders.  Vector data is based on the data in the document & the metadata.
  • Content works best in tables if it makes logical sense.
  • It's better to move Excel document data into Dataverse. Excel is iffy, so don't expect it to be excellent. Or Excel to PDF can work better. Remember to mark tables as tables in Excel (small tables; don't do massive worksheets). Limits are reached quickly.
  • Copilot can also return images; it's new, so no doubt more to come...
  • Support for Sensitivity Labels, set up so M365 copilot won't access highly confidential data or whatever policy you want.
  • Agents can access the MSGrapgh Data, including emails and SharePoint Onedrive.

Prompt Engineering


Sunday, 16 March 2025

SAP LeanIX Intro

  • LeanIx is an SAP Saas product that facilitates Enterprise Architecture (EA) in businesses, utilising dashboards and diagrams to support informed decision-making.   
  • To create the roadmap, align business goals with IT strategy by generating 'As-is' and 'To-be' architectures.
  • Improve integration, reduce complexity, and eliminate duplicate systems to make better decisions.

Note: Using Leanix is an all-in or don't bother tool.  LeanIx provides a comprehensive view of your applications, business processes, and interactions with IT assets.

3 Products make up LeanIX:

  1. Application Portfolio Management: The base product for recording the application landscape allows for inventory dependencies and identifying redundancies to optimise the application landscape.
  2. Architecture and Roadmap: Using the Application Portfolio, visualise the 'As Is' and 'To Be' architectures and visualise the impacts of change.
  3. Tech Risk and Compliance: We verify technology standards and can fund projects to help address data residency rule breaches.

Twelve fact sheets, such as the application fact sheet template, are essential. The meta model is the plan that shows how information in the fact sheets is interconnected.  

The "LeanIX Meta Model" at a high level shows the 4 EA architectural views:  

  1. Data Architecture
  2. Application Architecture
  3. Business Architecture
  4. Technical Architecture 

On top of the four architectural pillars sits Strategy & Transformation, covering:

  • GAP & Roadmap, 
  • Principles, 
  • Requirements and Assumptions.

What I Like:

  1. Inventory of Products, dependencies and link to documentation
  2. Nice predefined reports and the ability to collaborate with stakeholders
  3. Visualise dependencies, excellent reporting capabilities

Note: LeanIX is based on The Open Group Architecture Framework, i.e. TOGAF.  TOGAF's Architecture Development Method (ADM)