Analytics Engineering with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI

Foreword

A Note for Early Release Readers

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This will be the Foreword of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

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There is a role at the center of every successful data team that, until recently, did not have a name. The people in that role know enough SQL to be productive, enough Python to be respected, enough about reports and semantic models to make a business decision land, and enough about pipelines and lakehouses to keep the lights on.

The industry now has a name for that practitioner: the analytics engineer. And the book in your hands offers a clear and practical account of what the work is, why it matters, and how to do it well on Microsoft Fabric and Power BI.

I have spent my career building data platforms, and one observation has held true across every wave of technology, from the data warehouse through Hadoop and the cloud and now into AI. The value of a data platform shows up, in practice, at the seams of data projects. The seam between raw and refined. The seam between ingestion and modeling. The seam between a pipeline that runs on schedule and a number that people are willing to act ...