Author: Paul Turley

Fabric hands you an entire toolbox, but using all of it isn’t the goal — using the right pieces is. Here’s how to match workloads to real business problems, size capacity from actual usage, and roll out in phases with room to grow.

Excited about Fabric isn’t the same as ready for it. Here’s a simple way to size up where your admins, engineers, analysts, and business users each stand — and turn the gaps you find into a focused training plan instead of a report card.

Pilot versus enterprise-wide is the wrong debate — the real question is which one your organization is actually ready for. Here’s how to start narrow, learn fast, and earn your way to scale with Fabric.

Tenant settings are where good governance intentions either get put into practice or quietly forgotten. Here’s what to turn on, what to lock down, and what you can safely leave alone when you first launch Fabric.

Before anyone can open Fabric, they need an account and a license — and if some of them work outside your company, a plan for guest access too. Here’s where Fabric licenses actually live, and the easiest ways to hand them out.

Fabric licensing isn’t one decision, it’s two — and mixing them up is how budgets get blown. Here’s how per-user Power BI Pro and Premium Per User differ from Fabric’s capacity-based F-SKUs, why F64 is the line that matters most, and how to test it all with a free trial before you commit.

Now that I’ve put SQL Database in Fabric to work on real projects, here’s my take on what it costs, how it performs, and where it makes the most sense — compared to Azure SQL Database and SQL Server on a VM. The big surprise is in how it bills.

Turning Fabric on is the easy part — knowing where to click first is what actually saves you a headache. Here’s the tenant-capacity-workspace nesting to keep straight, where the Admin portal actually lives, and the five settings worth locking down before you invite anyone in.

Recently, I made an employment transition that felt like getting off a turbulent roller coaster ride, thinking “I survived the experience, but I never want to do that again!” I’m at a smaller firm that feels more like a team than a big corporate machine. This has caused serious reflection and raised the question: “why are we doing this?” What motivates the consultants who provide services to customers and how does that translate into the quality of the work they perform?

As I’m writing this, it is early morning in a small cottage in a quaint fishing village in Iceland. My girlfriend and I hope to see the Northern Lights and explore volcanos and waterfalls here on our way to a community conference in Denmark. We will visit New Zealand and Australia later this year on similar “working vacations”. These trips are possible because my profession connects me with a community of user group leaders and independent IT professionals who also navigate the fine line between work and pleasure. I absolutely love what I do and love to share it with other people. That’s why I’m a consultant.

Where are the Experts?

What motivates people who are truly passionate about their craft — particularly data consultants? Where can consulting customers look to find the experts who will be invested in seeing customer solutions through to completion? Executive leaders of the big company that I recently left had the idea – and built their business model – that they could find small consulting companies who employed the most talented and capable technology experts in the industry, that they could assimilate a huge company of expert consultants and lead the industry. With investment backing, they would buy up all these little companies, use the experienced workforce to be the senior team leaders and then use offshore staff to do the ongoing work and widen their profit margin. What could possibly go wrong with such a plan?

Fabric doesn’t erase what you already know from Power BI Premium or Azure Synapse — it mostly renames familiar furniture. Here’s how Premium capacities map to Fabric SKUs, how Synapse splits into Fabric experiences, and what to check before you migrate.

Microsoft Fabric brings data engineering, data warehousing, real-time analytics, and Power BI together into one SaaS platform built on OneLake. Here’s a plain-English look at why that consolidation matters, how Fabric compares to Synapse, Databricks, and Snowflake, and what this series will cover as we work through practical adoption.

Back in September 2025, about four months ago, I made this earlier post, as we were just gaining early experience…

This post is part of a series of excerpts from my forthcoming book “Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Associate Study…