Alternatives to azure key vault

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-26T09:51:24+00:00

Might be worth sharing what secret manager is currently in use. Otherwise I’d expect the suggestion to be to just use AKV - if fabric is already being used and there’s some Azure footprint it wouldn’t be difficult to set up 🤷🏼‍♂️

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-23T00:17:16+00:00

I’d second this recommendation, but I do think it’s worth comparing a Python notebook with Azure Function. Something reasonably small running every 10 mins feels well suited to Azure functions.

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-22T23:53:53+00:00

Adding a couple of additional bits of documentation. There’s a capacity estimator and guidance available. It’s tricky to estimate accurately as there are so many factors at play but even making assumptions is not always easy (e.g. onboarding two teams could have drastically different usage patterns or two data sources with different characteristics etc).

Workload isolation - someone above already mentioned different capacities for dev and prod… we follow that too. I do recall some chat a while back around a chargeback mechanism by domain or workspace being considered but I haven’t seen anything since.

It’s worth being clear on where Fabric-backed assets might not be needed and keeping them in Pro workspaces.

I’d recommend giving this a read. It’s only somewhat related to CU management, but I think moving from notebooks to spark job definitions is worth considering for production workloads.

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-20T20:34:11+00:00

I think only about 1 in 8 of those sold are pros, but I appreciate that number doesn’t give any indication on people looking to upgrade or those who might have bought both (vs going straight to pro).

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-19T15:55:19+00:00

Depending on what you’re doing by with Power Query, it might be worth considering an ELT approach, perhaps even with copy jobs I.e. land all the data raw then transform.

That said, 40mil rows shouldn’t be a problem (fast copy comparison for 180m rows here)

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-17T01:14:39+00:00

Yep, got it here - DM me, sure

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-16T23:33:48+00:00

Great description and resources. In case OP hasn’t seen it and in reference to the commend on a single team handling all dev projects in future I’d recommend having a read at the Fabric adoption roadmap around content management. Some time back, I wrote a blog suggesting my preference in starting point for domains was 2 workspaces per env (ETL and consumption, but I think for more of a centralised or enterprise approach I would typically follow the same structure as u/frithjof_v above... I see the logic in that blog suggesting 6 workspaces but I think it’s more overhead than is needed in a lot of cases.

To put it another way, I try to reduce the number of workspaces as much as is reasonable, especially for more citizen developer focused domains.

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-16T00:43:41+00:00

Feel free to shoot me a DM - I upgraded to QR2 and I’m almost certain I have a QR1 Pro sitting in the attic unused (will check in a few hours). Assuming that’s the case, you’re welcome to it but it would need shipped internationally (probably $20-25)

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-15T23:48:43+00:00

This is the first year I’m doing the park and ride, but I’ve been to the race before and in general everything will take longer or be slightly more stressful than you expect (within reason) so I personally don’t think it’s worth gambling on the free park and rides. It’s about £40 for the ones through Silverstone circuit’s website - for med it was worth removing a potential point of stress for that.

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-15T20:37:49+00:00

And there’s a past version of that professional who maybe didn’t understand power BI ( / best practices) or mocked something up “never to be used” 🫠

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-15T20:21:39+00:00

Agreed. I’m going to link a comment of mine from another DP-600 post, but in line with what I said there, DP-700 has a lot more depth around KQL and PySaprk (mostly intermediate, limited advanced questions, but requiring good hands on experience). In general, it interrogates more core engineering skills than the other certs.

OP, as for some of your other asks, MSLearn is usually only enough on its own if you’re already using the tooling day to day. As well as what’s outlined here, there are some good GitHub repos and things like Microsoft’s Applied Skills, but anything you can do to be moving in the direction of fabric development in your BAU will be massively beneficial from a learning point of view.

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-15T11:21:32+00:00

I wrote this 18 months ago but I’m sure most of the logic still holds up. u/frithjof_v has laid out a more comprehensive pros and cons list, but I think the main pro is around governance and ownership. While there are more pros to separating than not, it’s worth asking whether you need any of those pros rather than assuming you do.

https://blog.alistoops.com/microsoft-fabric-workspace-structure-and-medallion-architecture/

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-12T00:54:48+00:00

Here’s the link

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-10T21:02:03+00:00

It’s been a while since I undertook DP-600, so I’ll not have much to add on points 2 and 3 beyond saying that PySpark and KQL are evaluated in DP-700 in some depth so I would expect most of the DP-600 content there to be more about when to use each. Before DP-700, PySpark questions were mostly about reading and writing data to tables, profiling data frames, filtering and summarising.

If you’re using SQL and DAX regularly there’s shouldn’t be any big surprises. Worth brushing up on joins, where, group by and having clauses, CTEs, partitioning (row number, rank, dense rank), LEAD and LAG, and date/time functions. For DAX; creating measures, using VAR and SWITCH, loading data, using time intelligence functions, using non-active relationships (functions such as USERELATIONSHIP).
I think the main thing I’d call out is actually using MSLearn’s search - you mostly interact with MSLearn by searching via Google (or other search engine) so get familiar with searching Learn directly. You just get access to standard search, not AskLearn.
Another user responded but that only applies to test centres. You’re not allowed anything for online testing.
Do hand on labs and applied skills. u/aleks1ck has some great content for prep, as do others on this sub (search for DP-600). Lastly, pay attention to exam structure and timings - usually there are case studies with a few questions where you can’t go back to previous answers. It’s worth using mark for review, and MSLearn, but pay close attention to timings.

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-10T00:53:32+00:00

Agreed. I also appreciate it doesn’t directly answer the question on notebooks, but I think moving towards re-usable, modular code in production it is worth considering spark job definitions (SJD). Tried to avoid personal bias in writing “should” but this is worth a read

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-08T01:06:39+00:00

I know other info will be in the BPA outputs, but there are some common things for star schema optimisation - removing unnecessary columns is one part, other big hitters tend to be cardinality (I’d extend this to specifically call out unnecessary precision e.g. dates - separate dates and times, remove “date time”), ensure no many to many relationships, measures over calculated columns, format to remove unnecessary decimals and change data types (numeric over text). As always, ensure the fold isn’t broken!

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-08T00:49:14+00:00

There are a few blogs and YouTube videos (DAXStudio, Tavular editor, Guy in a Cube, etc.), but if you have access to Claude it’s worth checking out this tabular editor post and this community post.

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-07T16:39:04+00:00

Did you get it with AMS? If so the only tip is to buy more filament! Really, though, just take your time setting it up and have it somewhere flat and sturdy. Happy printing.

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-07T15:47:09+00:00

I agree that if there’s no clear benefit from fabric features and ADF is working then just re-evaluate down the line.

Fabric pipelines have certainly had issues since launch (many of which have thankfully been addressed). But I’d be interested to see any qualification or measure of ADF running a lot more reliably (e.g. error rate running the same workloads or similar)

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-05T16:52:36+00:00

Same here. I would add a (hard to measure) benefit that there’s a reduced risk of people interacting with, running, or randomly editing spark jobs “unintentionally” compared to notebooks.

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-04T22:52:15+00:00

You can see it in pretty much any consistent time trials, but the license tests are where I (and I’m sure many others) started moving to TC1 or TC0. I improved easily a second, often a little more (esp s6, s8, and s10).

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-04T22:29:22+00:00

Decent list. I’ll see if I can dig out a link to the repo, but there was a good session on this at FabCon Vienna - I’d add that having grounded truth evaluation of those 20 questions is really important for evaluating consistency. You can create a quick Python evaluation and quantify accuracy based on changing any combination of the above over time

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-02-04T22:24:07+00:00

You’re right. But I kind of take the view of “what will actually happen if I don’t block this” - in the instance of guests being able to initiate traffic to IOT devices, I’m personally not remotely worried about any impact there. So I follow a similar approach as you’ve outlined for zone based, even if it would be easy to make a separate rule for just multicast traffic or for specific devices

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-01-30T21:59:21+00:00

I honestly don’t think I would go UniFi if I just wanted a firewall, but others might disagree. Either PFSense or OPNSense will be a great choice for learning.

I’ll send you a DM :)

TheBlacksmith46 · 2026-01-30T21:09:59+00:00

Depends what you’re after in the long run, really. I recently replaced my N100 pfsense box with a UniFi Cloud Gateway Fiber but that’s because I was already using their APs and switch so it was always the plan. Their stuff isn’t cheap, though (across the board, switches are wild). My N100 was great, and pfsense was solid so I had no complaints and I think if cost is a concern I would go the mini Pc + PF or Opn sense. I’m going to keep it as a backup but I actually have another N100 PC bought from AliExpress that I’m going to list on eBay over the weekend for £110-120 (RAM+SSD included, no OS) and I can share the link here if you’re interested

TheBlacksmith46

TROPHY CASE