The voyage to Vegas
So it’s been two weeks since I returned from my trip to Las Vegas for the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, or #FabCon as all the cool kids are calling it.
Why has it taken so long for me to capture my thoughts on the event? Jet lag and life.
This was the furthest I’ve travelled abroad since my honeymoon to Canada back in 2008. And it turns out that overcoming jet lag in your forties is waaaay harder than doing it in your twenties. I definitely resembled a zombie for my first few days back “in” the office.
Beyond that, life is busy. I certainly spent a certain amount of time catching up on all the things I didn’t do whilst I was travelling. Two weeks on, chilling on a Saturday morning with a coffee, I finally feel I have the headroom to write down my impressions of the event.
So how was it?
Well for starters, Vegas is a weird place. The conference took place at the MGM Grand, where I also had accommodation. That sounds convenient doesn’t it? But you have to take in to account the enormity of the venue. To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the MGM Grand is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-boggingly big it is.
“Nipping” back to your room from the conference centre could easily turn into an expedition in its own right. For scale, I think the area where they served breakfast for the conference was probably as big as the next biggest conference that I’ve attended to date.
Getting lost in the casinos of the MGM (which of course you have to walk through to get to and from anywhere) was very easy. And the weirdness continued with the fact it’s legal to smoke indoors there, which felt very alien, with it not being uncommon to see people sparking up whilst in the bars (or indeed at a slot machine). The idea that they don’t want you to have any concept of time whilst you are there held true, and actually seeing daylight became a rare treat.
This isn’t a travel blog though. You want to know about the actual conference right? All in all, I believe the event hosted over 4000 data nerd and fabricators. This was my first time attending an event with such a grandiose key note. Pretty much all of those attendees crammed into a vast room, as Arun Ulag, Corporate Vice President of Azure Data outlined the future for Fabric. You can catch that keynote on YouTube.
Many an announcement was greeted with a huge whoop or cheer… very different to the reserved British crowds I’m used to gracing.
If I am going to be mean and cynical, some of those announcements I found underwhelming. The first iteration of Fabric has managed to miss so many no brainer features, that Microsoft have somehow set themselves a low bar for impressing their target audience. Announcements around on-premise connectivity for Dataflows, source control for Data Factory and Folders for workspaces were greeted as though this is some kind of new dawn for data. I mean, if I was reviewing a meal at a fancy restaurant, would I really wax lyrical about the fact they gave me cutlery?!
I think all of these things should have been there on day one (or at least by day one of general availability). Any criticism I’ve given of Fabric so far has often included one of my favourite Ron Swanson quotes (of Parks and Recreation fame if you’re unfamiliar): “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing”. I sometimes feel like the pursuit of new shiny things has been a distraction from establishing some features that most data professionals would consider fundamental.
Which kind of brings me to the part of the keynote which did excite me. Because there were a ton of announcements of new shiny things. This gives me mixed feelings. If Fabric is going to be a force to be reckoned with, it will need a unique selling point (USP). Something to set it apart from competitor platforms. I just hope these new things don’t get in the way of getting those fundamentals right first.
But for me those new killer things include:
Workspace Branches – the idea that branching from your git repo spins up a whole new isolated workspace for you to work in automatically
Task Flows – I way to see a holistic, lineage-esque view of your entire Fabric solution, but also containing templates that let you “one-click” the set up of popular design patterns.
Metrics Layer – a way to centrally define and share KPIs and metrics across semantic models.
Predictably Co-Pilot was prominent again, though as the name has always suggested, the story here is not really about automation and more about assistance. Expect to see Co-Pilot play a huge part in debugging experiences.
And as someone who works for a Databricks partner, it was pleasing to see the “Better together” story still being pushed. Being able to register Fabric tables in Databricks Unity Catalog is a very welcome new feature, but the love flows both ways, with Microsoft developing a new “special” short cut that allows you to point at Unity Catalog, making sure new entities automatically become visible in Fabric.
These will both make the proposition of hybrid approaches look even better, so I really hope these both land soon.
All of these new announcements have certainly left me feeling enthused for the future of Fabric. If Microsoft can deliver on this vision, Fabric as the fully integrated platform is aspires to be could certainly become the dominant player in the analytics industry.
The questions remains though of not only IF they can deliver, but when. Microsoft publish their roadmap for Fabric so that we can keep tabs on forthcoming features. I can see a lot of the fundamental features called out in this roadmap, the features that for me make Fabric a viable option. But the killer USP options don’t seem to have shown up on it yet, so I don’t really have a timeline for when the things that excite me are due to arrive.
If would be remiss of me not mention at some point one of the very best features of the conference; the people. It’s a somewhat cliched point to labour, but it’s true, the folks around the Microsoft data community are a fantastic bunch. It was great to catch up with acquaintances old and new.
And yes, I did eventually venture out of the MGM complex, getting chance to see more of the Vegas strip, a visit to downtown Vegas and to the Meow Wolf exhibition on the outskirts of town.
I feel very privileged that my employers Advancing Analytics supported my trip there.
1 Comment
Donald Parish · April 13, 2024 at 9:29 pm
Getting all my Git together with Fabric excites me. Our current setup has separate Git repos for ADF, Databricks, and Synapse (external tables). Spinning off separate workspaces makes this simple, and may allow for easier testing.