This week I was mostly focused on official documentation around Power BI and Microsoft Fabric. I also went through a few articles on Azure Cosmos DB data migration patterns, using Vector Similarity in Azure SQL DB and a list of new features for Azure Machine Learning. Also, don’t miss the article about Voyager, an LLM-based agent. Good reading!

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Power BI

Power BI: Find Insights in your reports (preview)
This Insights feature helps you easily explore and find insights such as anomalies and trends in your data as you interact and consume your reports. It notifies you if there are interesting insights and provides explanations for them. It works out of the box on any report, so you can automatically start getting insights from your reports without any setup.

Power BI: Create key influencers visualizations
The key influencers visual helps you understand the factors that drive a metric you’re interested in. It analyzes your data, ranks the factors that matter, and displays them as key influencers. For example, suppose you want to figure out what influences employee turnover, which is also known as churn. One factor might be employment contract length, and another factor might be commute time.

Generate data insights on your dataset automatically with Power BI
Run quick insights to generate interesting visualizations based on your data. This article explains how to run quick insights on an entire dataset (quick insights). You can also run quick insights on a specific dashboard tile (scoped insights). You can even run insights on an insight!

How to Use Power BI for Accurate Forecasting and Analysis (Updated 2023)
In the field of data science and data analytics, time series forecasting and time series analysis are important metrics in building data models or machine-learning models as it gives you the ability to “see” ahead of time and make plans in your business accordingly. One tool that can help with this is Power BI – a business analytics service that provides interactive visualizations, formatting, and business intelligence capabilities.

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Microsoft Fabric

Ingest, transform, and route real-time events with Microsoft Fabric event streams
You can now ingest, capture, transform and route real-time events to various destinations in Microsoft Fabric with a no-code experience using Microsoft Fabric event streams. It enables customers to ingest real-time event data from external event sources into the data stores in Fabric. The events could be transformed into the native formats required for target destination. For example, Eventstream could transform the events into Delta Lake format for the Lakehouse, into SQL columns based on the table schema, or filter events so that homogenous data can be sent to a KQL table.

Microsoft Fabric licenses
Microsoft Fabric is a platform that allows users to get, create, share, and visualize data using various tools. To share content and collaborate in Microsoft Fabric, your organization needs to have an organizational license and at least one individual license.

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Azure Cosmos DB

Options to migrate your on-premises or cloud data to Azure Cosmos DB
You can load data from various data sources to Azure Cosmos DB. Since Azure Cosmos DB supports multiple APIs, the targets can be any of the existing APIs. In order to support migration paths from the various sources to the different Azure Cosmos DB APIs, there are multiple solutions that provide specialized handling for each migration path. This document lists the available solutions and describes their advantages and limitations.

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Azure SQL Database

Vector Similarity Search with Azure SQL database and OpenAI
Vectors can be efficiently stored in Azure SQL database by columnstore indexes. There is no specific data type available to store a vector in Azure SQL database, but we can use some human ingenuity to realize that a vector is just a list of numbers. As a result, we can store a vector in a table very easily by creating a column to contain vector data. One row per vector element. We can then use a columnstore index to efficiently store and search for vectors.

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Azure Machine Learning

Azure Machine Learning – General Availability for Build
List of Azure ML features which are Generally Available, since Build 2023.

Azure Machine Learning – Public Preview for Build
List of Azure ML features which are in Public Preview, since Build 2023.

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Awesome Stuff

Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models
We introduce Voyager, the first LLM-powered embodied lifelong learning agent in Minecraft that continuously explores the world, acquires diverse skills, and makes novel discoveries without human intervention. Voyager consists of three key components: 1) an automatic curriculum that maximizes exploration, 2) an ever-growing skill library of executable code for storing and retrieving complex behaviors, and 3) a new iterative prompting mechanism that incorporates environment feedback, execution errors, and self-verification for program improvement. Voyager interacts with GPT-4 via blackbox queries, which bypasses the need for model parameter fine-tuning.

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Have a great week!