This week we had Microsoft Ignite 2022 and, as usual, a lot of announcements and really interesting sessions. Use the Book of News below to check it out. Besides that, I listened to two interesting podcasts, and explored the Elastic Database Model of Azure SQL and a few topics around Power BI. Happy learning!

---

Podcasts

The Azure Podcast

Episode 441: Databricks Accelerator for Azure Purview
The team catches up with the developers of the Databricks Accelerator for Azure Purview to learn when, where, and why you might use it.

.NET Rocks

Episode 1815: Testing Web Apps using Playwright Debbie O’Brien
How do you test your web applications? Carl and Richard talk to Debbie O’Brien about Playwright, Microsoft’s new open-source web application testing tool. Playwright lets you build tests in an array of languages, platforms, and browsers. Debbie talks about how you can build atomic tests that will survive new versions, and test independently of other features. And when tests fail, Playwright generates a PWA of the test run showing exactly where the test fails!

---

Microsoft Ignite 2022

Microsoft Ignite 2022 Book of News
Welcome everyone to Microsoft Ignite, and once again we have a book’s worth of news about Azure, AI, Business Applications, Industry Cloud, Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Security and Windows ready for your reading pleasure!

Announcing registries in Azure Machine Learning to operationalize models and pipelines at scale
We are excited to announce the public preview of registries in Azure Machine Learning. Registries in Azure Machine Learning are organization wide repositories of machine learning assets such as models, environments, and components. Registries provide a central platform for cataloging and operationalizing machine learning models across various personas, teams and environments involved in the machine learning lifecycle. Registries foster better collaboration among data science teams by offering a central platform to share and discover machine learning models and pipelines.

How Microsoft Azure helps drive agility and optimization for your business
We aim to be the world’s computer and most trusted cloud partner for all workloads. No matter where you are on your cloud journey, we have the expertise, capabilities, and platform to help increase agility, optimize technology investments, and create data-driven experiences. To that end, we’re announcing several new developments to help our customers optimize their resources and get the most out of their existing investments.

---

Power BI

What Is The Difference Between A Live Connection And DirectQuery Mode In Power BI?
It’s very easy to get confused between a Live connections and DirectQuery mode in Power BI: the customers I work with frequently get them mixed up, partly because they are similar concepts, partly because other BI tools use the term “live connection” to refer to what Power BI calls DirectQuery mode. In this post I will explain the differences between these two terms.

Configure incremental refresh and real-time data
This article describes how to configure incremental refresh and real-time data for datasets. To learn about configuring incremental refresh for dataflows, see Premium features of dataflows – Incremental refresh.

Announcing Public Preview of Hybrid Tables in Power BI Premium
We are excited to announce support of Hybrid Tables in Power BI Premium, which enables us in turn to announce an equally exciting and groundbreaking enhancement to incremental refresh – incremental refresh augmented with real-time data!!! Now you can have blazing fast performance in import mode and the latest data changes in the data warehouse reflected in user reports without having to perform a dataset refresh.

---

Azure SQL

Distributed transactions across cloud databases
Elastic database transactions for Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance allow you to run transactions that span several databases. Elastic database transactions are available for .NET applications using ADO.NET and integrate with the familiar programming experience using the System.Transaction classes.

Azure SQL Database elastic query overview
The elastic query feature (in preview) enables you to run a Transact-SQL query that spans multiple databases in Azure SQL Database. It allows you to perform cross-database queries to access remote tables, and to connect Microsoft and third-party tools (Excel, Power BI, Tableau, etc.) to query across data tiers with multiple databases. Using this feature, you can scale out queries to large data tiers and visualize the results in business intelligence (BI) reports.

Building scalable cloud databases
Scaling out databases can be easily accomplished using scalable tools and features for Azure SQL Database. In particular, you can use the Elastic Database client library to create and manage scaled-out databases. This feature lets you easily develop sharded applications using hundreds—or even thousands—of databases in Azure SQL Database.

Multi-tenant SaaS database tenancy patterns
When designing a multi-tenant SaaS application, you must carefully choose the tenancy model that best fits the needs of your application. A tenancy model determines how each tenant’s data is mapped to storage. Your choice of tenancy model impacts application design and management. Switching to a different model later is sometimes costly.

---

Cool Stuff

Microsoft Learn Cloud Games
Enjoy the thrill of solving real-world challenges in immersive role-playing games that can help you sharpen your technical skills.

---

Have a great week!

Photo by Elia Mazzaro on Unsplash