I needed to run a PowerShell cmdlet in an Azure Devops pipeline. The cmdlet in question was New-AzRoleAssignment, but the cmdlet itself isn’t important. What is important is that I needed to pass the object ID of a service principal to the command. Even though I was pretty sure the syntax and everything was correct, […]
Parameterize Linked Service in ADF with no Dynamic Content available
When you create linked services in Azure Data Factory (ADF) or in a Synapse Workspace, you typically want to parameterize certain properties of the connection. When you deploy your artefacts to another environment, you can change the parameter values to switch the connection to the new environment. For example, the server name of the connection […]
Free Webinar – Build a data warehouse on Azure Data Platform for $150
I’m presenting a free webinar at MSSQLTips.com at Thursday, July 10, 2025 at 6PM UTC (8PM CET or 2PM EDT). The abstract: As you might learn from the abstract, the session is aimed at people working with “small data”. Just a couple of gigabytes, biggest table is below 100 million rows. But you would be […]
Techorama 2025 – Slides
You can find the slides for my session Building the €100 data warehouse with the Azure Data Platform on GitHub.
Redgate SQL Prompt in SSMS 21
Disclaimer: this post is not sponsored by Redgate 🙂 For those who’ve missed it, the new version of SSMS is now generally available. It’s a big new version and it now uses Visual Studio 22 behind the scenes, so it’s now installed through the Visual Studio Installer. Anyway, I’m a big fan of Redgate SQL […]
Execute Fabric Data Pipeline from Azure Data Factory
In the blog post Call a Fabric REST API from Azure Data Factory I explained how you can call a Fabric REST API endpoint from Azure Data Factory (or Synapse if you will). Let’s go a step further and execute a Fabric Data Pipeline from an ADF pipeline, which is a common request. A Fabric […]
Azure Data Factory Pipeline Debugging Fails with BadRequest
I recently had a new pipeline fail. It was actually a copy of an old pipeline where I had made some adjustments into as part of a database migration. When triggered during an execution run, it failed saying some expression could not be parsed. When I went into the pipeline and triggered a debug, it […]
Call a Fabric REST API from Azure Data Factory
Suppose you want to call a certain Microsoft Fabric REST API endpoint from Azure Data Factory (or Synapse Pipelines). This can be done using a Web Activity, and most Fabric APIs now support service principals or managed identities. Let’s illustrate with an example. I’m going to call the REST API endpoint to create a new […]
Cool Stuff in Snowflake – Part 14: Asynchronous Execution of SQL Statements
I’m doing a little series on some of the nice features/capabilities in Snowflake (the cloud data warehouse). In each part, I’ll highlight something that I think it’s interesting enough to share. It might be some SQL function that I’d really like to be in SQL Server, it might be something else. It’s been a while since I […]
How I passed the DP-700 Exam
I recently took and passed the DP-700 exam, which is required for the Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification. It’s the second Fabric certification, and it focuses more on the data engineering aspect of Fabric, as well as a bit of governance and administration. My preparation for this exam is probably fairly atypical, because: […]