Fabric Data Integration: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – Prologika
Microsoft is pushing dataflows to “data engineer, data integrator, and business analyst”. My guidance is to consider dataflows only if you want to open data ingestion to business users (something you must carefully think about and definitely surround it with a log of supervision). As its predecessor (Power BI dataflows), Power Query is notoriously difficult to troubleshoot or optimize. It doesn’t support the ELT pattern (my favorite), such as to handle Type 2 changes. This could be partially ramified by implementing a pipeline that mixes dataflows with other ADF artifacts, such as calling stored procedures in Fabric Warehouse. Moreover, I consider Power Query as a Microsoft proprietary tool, irrespective that the M language is documented. If one day you decide to leave Fabric, you’d need to rewrite your flows. Finally, the only output options supported are append or replace (no update).Moving to ADF, the copy activity supports only append or replace (no update). Outside Fabric, Azure Data Fabric doesn’t have connectors to connect to Fabric yet.
