Hi everyone. Welcome to figuring out fabric where I ask dumb questions and you get smart answers. And I'm excited to have Alexi on here in part because it's probably just my perception, but it feels a lot like a couple of years ago. He just came out of nowhere. Like I hadn't heard about you at all. Wasn't aware of you. And then due to work, I suddenly had to actually learn about fabric and your YouTube was one of the resources that came up over and over and over again. And so it was uh kind of funny to see this new face that was helping me with some projects that were kind of difficult because I had tried learning fabric before it even came out. I bounced off of it. And then about two years ago, I had to deliver a week long training on power BI and one day had to be on fabric. So suddenly I had to actually learn it. And then a year ago, I had to help a company with a greenfield fabric implementation. And so Your YouTube was one of the most comprehensive out there, which I really appreciated. And now, uh you know, you're a data architect, you're a Microsoft MVP, you're growing all these communities. So I'm a moderator on the, um, discord fabric discord along with you. And then you've got fabric school. So do you want to introduce yourself a little bit? Talk about how you got involved with fabric and what you do. Yeah, I can introduce myself briefly. like you mentioned, my name is Aleksi. I'm from Finland, the land of Santa Claus, actually. And also I have been doing quite a lot of stuff around fabric during like the last two years or so. Like I think it was summer of uh 23 when I started my YouTube channel. I first started basically with Azure Data Factory stuff, but Okay. was just emerging at that point. It had recently came out as a beta, I think, at that stage. Then I was first thinking, okay, another Synapse. Yeah, fun story. I have seen this one before. That was my initial reaction to fabric, that I don't see this being a thing. But then I saw how much effort Microsoft was really putting into fabric. And I was like, okay, this is not going to be another Synapse thing. This is going to be something way better. and then like before the end of the year. So after I had made like a few months of data factory videos as a data factory videos, I decided that I will go all in fabric and I will start to only produce fabric content. So that's how I got started with the YouTube thing. And I think I was like one of the early channels that covered like mainly fabric stuff. So it worked really well in that regard, I think. Yeah, I agree with that because Fabric has a similar problem as Azure. Like the idea of being an Azure YouTuber is just horrifying because like people will make like a periodic table visualization of all the services in Azure. But, and so I think there's a lot of value in kind of covering that breadth, especially because one of the things that I liked about some of the stuff that you did is you would actually do comparisons. about, okay, we need to like move data around. Well, here's gen two data flows. Here's notebooks, here's pipelines. And that was really helpful for me because a lot of times you're presented with all these things and you're presented with them kind of in isolation. And as an actual implementer, you have to decide, do I need a grapefruit spoon or a butter knife? I mean, they both can cut, but they're meant for very different things. And so I think by going all in, you're, you've been able to cover a breadth there. That's very, very hard for regular folks to do. Like I'm, I come from the power BI side. I'm never going to make content on real time intelligence. I, um, I'm, I don't know if I'm ever going to use their new graph TV or any of that kind of stuff. So I think there's been a lot of value and I'm glad it's worked out. I mean, you've gotten the Microsoft MVP, I assume in part. for all this content, but also the fact that you've been helping with the community regularly. So I think it has worked out. Yeah, I have been like very active in community in general, like I think past like one and a half years. And ah actually, I got nominated by Alex Powers. like because I was, yeah, I was active in the Marks Fabric subreddit. So shout out to Marks Fabric subreddit. It's an amazing place. But yeah, that's been very happy with the subreddits. Alex does a great job of curating that, but also just the fact that like, I've taken a little bit of a break the past like month or so to focus on like losing weight, but people are very responsive there. You can actually get answers. I'm a little concerned about how responsive the Microsoft employees are because I don't know why anyone would voluntarily want to go there. So sometimes I wonder. If you know someone's being like a runes like you, but you need to be checking this every day. Um, but it's a great, it's a great community for sure. Yeah, but it's quite nice to see how many actually Microsoft employees are writing their stuff. You can get direct answers from the product team in the Reddit quite easily. That's super nice to see. Well, and there's so many times where like, because they're willing to like shout out to his username is like warehouse go vroom or something like that. can't remember. Uh, but like you'll have people that will actually talk about the internals, which is so helpful for understanding like performance issues or what's going wrong with a lot of this stuff. Um, so one of the things we wanted to talk about is certifications. And I think you've been in an interesting position with that. one because the fact that you kind of went all in has allowed you to cover the breadth and the fabric certs are all about breadth. But then also you've had a site called Sertiace that you've been involved with. So why did you decide to kind of get involved with certifications and make content for that? Yeah, certifications. They are a really interesting topic. Basically certifications were one of the reasons why my channel kind of blew up, if you can say that. Basically because I started making a series on DP700 and I think I was the first one probably who started a series while the certification was still in beta. So Yeah. was at that stage. So I started making that series and that actually gained a lot of subscribers from my channel because people really want to do those certifications and Fabric Search, think, especially have been really, really popular and Microsoft has been doing a really good job for getting those out there and people getting certified. ah yeah, certifications, ah that was like a big driver there, but I like I have some mixed feelings about certifications, to be honest. Because I have been teaching a lot of certification stuff. And people get really... oh I get lot of views for those videos that cover certification-related topics. But in many ways, I get a feeling that many times people are just interested in getting the badge and not really actually learning the thing. And that kind of annoys me because they have this high school attitude towards those exams. I definitely had that in high school that I just want to pass. Maybe in university also to some degree. But like these fabric certifications especially, I think Microsoft has really nailed the scope with these ones. And they have like really good stuff that you actually need for your day-to-day work. And they have like, in my opinion, quite a little of that fluff stuff that you don't really need. Of course, not everybody is building real-time intelligence stuff and that kind of thing. Yeah. cert. Yeah, I haven't taken the fabric certs. I've thought about it a lot and I've intended to do it a lot, but life has kind of gotten in the way. But I've wondered about that because I think, embarrassingly, I haven't been certified since I think SharePoint 2016. um When you work as a consultant, people stop asking for your resume, believe it or not, except for like big firms. Um, but back when I did get certified in like share point and Microsoft office, especially SQL server, you would get the feeling like this is like 2012, 2016 era. You would get the feeling that some of the stuff was there was a product feature that some product group wanted to push or marketing wanted to push. And I don't like no, no shade to Microsoft. Like they're doing all the work to create these certifications. That's well within their prerogative, like for the SQL one, for example, I remember that I had to learn the four different ways that you could produce XML output with T SQL. It was like raw auto and then four path and for XML. feel like I have, I have never needed that. There's certainly been times that I've used that, but I've always been Googling some specific thing. Like I'm dealing with X events or something like that. And so I think I've written a blog post we'll put in the show notes about, um, you know, should you get certified? And I think the important thing, I don't want anyone to be cynical, but you have to understand that Microsoft is creating the search has multiple incentives. Um, I don't know, I haven't been a Microsoft partner for a long time, but for a while, a lot of you had to have a lot of people that were certified. So it's a way to kind of set the minimum bar for those folks. It's a way to. encourage people to learn about some of this technology, but it is also a way to learn. Like one of the things I really like about certs is even if you never take the exam, it provides a learning path that you can build off of. And with something like fabric that's so big, it's really easy to get overwhelmed. Um, but I think certs are really great when you don't have a lot else to point to because I don't know if it's been your experience, but at least in the United States with it, experiences King, And so once you have like three to five years of experience, a lot of the credentials don't matter nearly so much, but that first job is such a pain. Like I remember I used to advise people like it, if you have to work help desk for a year, do it and do it for a year or two, just so you can get some experience on your resume. And then it's so much easier. I don't know if that's been your experience. You've heard anything like that, but Yeah, I think now when we have whole AI things going on and that like getting a job as like a junior level guy, it's gonna be super, super hard. Like you really kind of, you have to stand out and maybe certifications are one thing how you can stand out if you don't have like any job experience, but you have put in the time to got those certs, you already proving something that you have learned something and you are willing to learn those topics. Yeah, no, I definitely agree with that. um So you said that they've the search have been fairly popular in your experience. Like I know Microsoft's been aggressively pushing them, but I'd be curious to hear a little bit more about that. Yeah, I think because like in the last Fabcon, I think they announced that like 75,000 people have gotten like fabric certified and I think that's a lot and I think in some Fabcon they said that like DP600 or DP700 was one of the fastest growing shirts ever if I remember correctly. that already says something. Yeah, but like I agree with you about those like that I have had experiences with other certifications that they were kind of pushing some specific feature there. Like for example, back in like Azure Data Engineering days when I did the Azure Data Engineer certification, Cosmos DB was a huge part of that certification. Like I was like, who Azure Data Engineer uses Cosmos DB? Like I didn't know anybody basically. Maybe for some application development or other stuff you would use Cosmos DB, but I didn't see the point why they were pushing Cosmos DB so hard. But it was a new feature back then or relatively new feature, so they wanted to push that in the certification. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Um, so this shows how far behind I am, but I believe there was a new one that came out the DP 800. Is that correct? Can you talk about that at all? Since I'll be learning as well along with the audience, but Yeah, DP800. Basically, it's not the certification that I am planning to take, because it's like heavy SQL AI developer certification. I think like audience for DP800 is vastly different compared to DP700 and DP600. Because DP600 and DP700 are fairly similar certifications. They are very fabric focused and they actually have quite a lot of oh overlap. they have like an overlap, but then that DP800, it is a SQL certification. So if you are a DBA doing some SQL AI applications, then that's a certification for you. But I'm not doing that stuff. So it's not really my certification to do, but yeah. I wonder when we're gonna get a course correction with Microsoft with some of this stuff. I think in some ways, it's still full speed ahead with the AI kind of piece. I feel uncomfortable with how many of the certifications have been relabeled AI or had that stuff put in. It kind of reminds me of there was a company called like Long Island IST here in the United States. And they changed the name to like Long Island Bitcoin or something. when the Bitcoin wave was happening just to try and juice their stock. um But I think we've seen a little bit of a pulling back in the window space because they said they were going to work on quality. They were going to pull copilot out of stuff that in my opinion didn't really need it. Like no one was clamoring for copilot and notepad or paint. And um I think they're pulling some of that stuff out. So I, I hope they continue to be good stewards. of the, of the search, because I feel like a lot of them have been good quality and a lot of them have been stuff that I've been proud to have on my resume back when that made a bigger difference for me. Um, so another thing I wanted to talk about is you've been doing a lot with like the community, both sort of like we have the public community with say like Reddit and then discord, which is kind of this hybrid where anyone can join, but it's not necessarily something you find on a Google search. And then you've been kind of curating your own community with some other people with fabric schools. So do you want to kind of talk about your involvement with that? Because I think it's, it's always admirable when someone's able to do that, because it feels like hurting cats sometimes. Yeah, where do you want to start? Yeah, I mean, I guess what, what motivated you to, to do all this kind of stuff. Cause I think like for me, I've been involved with the Reddit because I think it's good target practice and it's nice to feel a sense of satisfaction, but I think you've been going kind of above and beyond with a lot of this stuff. So what was kind of your initial motivation? Yeah, like I founded the Discord server like last summer. It was a thing like I was thinking about, okay, I have this YouTube channel. There are like lot of people asking questions. And then I was like, how could I answer to these questions and have maybe other people to answer them as well? Because like YouTube comment sections and those are not that like, they're not that they don't have that community thing there. So I was like, maybe I was like checking like different options and then I realized that there isn't like a dedicated Markzot Fabric community on Discord. At least I couldn't find one. So I was like, maybe I will have found one there and then I did. And then initially it was like a dedicated place for my YouTube channel. But then the thing started to grow and it was like obvious that this is growing now something to be something bigger than some like a forum or discussion place for people who watch my videos. And then I decided that this should be like a dedicated community server. So I kind of gave that to the community and I was like, okay, community can have this place because it was turning out to be a great place for different people to discuss different fabric topics. So that's how that came about. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And it's been great that you've done it. We've had, I know we have a variety of moderators and we have a lot of people that are getting involved. And I definitely, if you're listening to this, I encourage you to join the subreddit, join the discord. I think there's, there's something really satisfying in being able to, to give back and to help people. And I think even just selfishly, I found the best way to learn about something is to try to answer other people's questions. because it or make content because it forces you to think a little bit more deeply about stuff. It forces you to just do some research and all that kind of stuff. Now, you also have a sort of a private community you've been working on with some other people that's a little bit more focused. So do you want to talk a little bit about the whole fabric school kind of thing? Because it seems like an interesting experiment for sure. it's basically called Fabric Forge. It's on school platform. So the thing there was that I wanted to create a place where I could create more of these structured learning paths more easily. That have combinations of video lectures and then actually some hands-on exercises where files are provided and then there are video solutions and then there were other people. like uh Hey Nite, Mu and Anton, who I'm doing that with, who also wanted to make some content. And then I was like thinking that maybe this is something that we could collaborate on and create that and also offer something more to some people. Like we have a weekly call there every Wednesday, like from our premium members that are able to hop into a call with us and then we can discuss different fabric topics there and In many cases, we do deep dives to specific topics. example, Heini has done some topics. Heini is, by the way, another Microsoft MVP, but she did some topics about fabric networking features and also using Terraform with fabric. Those kind of deep dive topics we cover on those weekly calls. And they have been very popular and people have been really happy with them. That's awesome. So we've talked about kind of how you got started, we talked about some of the certification content that community stuff. So I guess uh one of last things like, what, what's, what's your plan for the next year? What are you working on? Or anything, anything new and exciting? Yeah, I have like a new thing on my YouTube channel, like where I'm like bringing guests there, like present some type of topic. Like the thing there is to have like a demo and maybe some slides about like a specific topic. And I have some really, really interesting guests coming there from product team and other MVPs and community members that they have like a specific topic that they would like to present. covered there. that's what I'm doing right now. Like I have been like not doing so many YouTube videos because I have been way too busy with other stuff because I'm doing consulting full time and I don't have that more than 24 hours. like I have to prioritize sometimes. But now I'm focusing more on my YouTube channel again and doing more videos and doing videos with other people. So if you are also interested, you can come and present some topic there if you want. I have to say that I admire you for being able to do any of that because I've never been able to manage like a weekly content cadence. Like I don't know if it's me or just too many personal responsibilities. I will say it is kind of funny you talk about bringing people on. At MVP Summit you did some YouTube shorts and it was like X or Y and it... uh and I gave my opinion about why I prefer warehouse and T-SQL notebooks and the LinkedIn comments got a little heated. It's surprising how opinionated people can be about some of this stuff. Yeah, I think you should bring that one person here and talk about that, like Lakehouse and Warehouse. I recommend that you do that. That would be a really good episode. If you're listening, you know who you are. All right, well, very cool. So why don't we go ahead and wrap up with a few questions. um So what is your favorite fabric feature? ah I have to say notebooks. Like I'm really a notebook guy because like I have been doing like doing like Azure data engineering stuff many years before like Fabrica and I use Databricks there and Databricks notebooks and I really really love my notebooks. They are like my swiss army knife of data engineering because with notebooks you can code, you can do everything basically if you want. I think for a long time, I did not understand the point of notebooks. think now that I've gotten settled with fabric, I do, or at least some of them. But initially, I saw, this is like, think like 2013, when data science was like the hot new thing, it felt to me like just a weird way to do data exploration for people that were in love with Python libraries, like Matplotlib and all that kind of stuff. and it made sense as a way to add some documentation and comments around code, but it didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time. But now, see how it supports an iterative kind of development that's really, really nice. so for those of you, we've had a couple episodes on notebooks, but if you haven't done much with them, especially with Python, it keeps track of the variable stuff. And so very often, I might run a piece of code, something seems off or didn't work the way that I want. And I'll immediately add a new code cell that prints out the values or resets the variable and then I'll rerun it. And you can do a kind of, uh, sometimes called a rebel loop, read, evaluate, print loop. And it's really, really convenient. So they, it took me a while to understand the point of them. Um, but I agree. They've, they've definitely grown on me. Um, So uh what is your least favorite fabric feature? Maybe something that's not fully baked yet or has just had some paper cut moments or whatever. Yeah, I was thinking about this one and I would have to say that the whole connection management thing is quite a mess for me because I don't like that at all. That it's very difficult to see what kind of connections people have created. think Fabric Admin cannot even see what type of connections there have been created. that's like very, very messy at the moment and all the key vault support and secret management. It's not great at the moment. I've, I've found it challenging too, because as, as a consultant, um, at a certain point, your account's going to be deactivated. And so just in general, making sure that nothing horrible happens and just stops working. And I had this happen by accident because someone hadn't filled out some paperwork and this big customer that I've been working with, my account got deactivated at the end of the fiscal year and suddenly a bunch of stuff stopped working. And I've even had issues recently where a bunch of stuff stopped working because some sort of auth token expired. And I don't know if that's a normal thing that happens every like three or four months or what I suspect is I went to SQL bits. and I got an email from IT like, was this you or is this some hacker? And I said, no, it me. It's fine. But suddenly after that, a bunch of stuff starts working. And the only way that I could fix it is I had to like make a change to a pipeline or I had to go into the connection and I had to just re log in. And so yeah, it feels very much like this. I don't know if you have these in Finland, but we call it a junk drawer where it's the drawer in your house that just has all the random stuff. And so that's kind of how the connection manager feels like right now. So I, totally agree. so the, the last two questions, um, there's way too many social media networks. I think you've experienced the pain of trying to be on all of them. Um, so if people want to reach out to you, where they, where can they find you? And then we talked about a couple of things, but what do you want to like pitch or promote? Yeah, I think the best place if you want to find me is find my YouTube channel Alex Bartanen Master Microsoft Fabric. That's my YouTube channel. Basically, if you go there, you can find all these other places that we just talked about. I think that's a good starting point if you want to find me. Very cool. All right. Well, I appreciate your time. was a pleasure to have you on Alexi. Thank you. Okay. And stop.