Browse All Machine Learning Content (193)

Wiliam_Rosa explains how Azure Databricks cross-engine ABAC enforces Unity Catalog row filters, column masks, and ABAC policies for external Apache Spark reads by routing queries through a Databricks-managed serverless enforcement layer, including required metastore settings, grants, Spark configuration, known limitations, and cost tracking.

sbaynes interviews Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 lead race strategist Joey McMillan on how the team uses Microsoft Azure—especially Azure Batch—to run large-scale race simulations quickly enough to influence live, race-day strategy decisions under changing weather and track conditions.

RicardoDuncan rounds up the latest SQL developer tooling updates for VS Code, including new MSSQL extension features, GitHub Copilot schema-aware agent workflows, and Microsoft SQL “skills” for assessing and migrating SQL Server to Azure SQL, plus driver releases aligned with SQL Server 2025.

Microsoft Developer presents a Data Exposed session on Fabric Database Hub, focusing on bringing Azure SQL, SQL Server, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL, and Fabric databases into a single place for discovery, estate-level visibility, governance, and AI-assisted insights to prioritize actions.

kinfey explains how to use small language models (SLMs) as typed “decision components” inside an application, then walks through a concrete pipeline using Microsoft Olive to LoRA fine-tune Qwen3.5-0.8B, export to CUDA FP16 ONNX, and validate decisions via option-letter probabilities.

sukkaur announces a preview feature that enables workspace-level Private Link connectivity for SQL database in Microsoft Fabric, aimed at tightening network access and reducing exposure by keeping database traffic on private networking paths.

vinilv shows how to build a small, two-node kubeadm Kubernetes cluster on Azure using an N-series GPU VM, then validate GPU scheduling with the NVIDIA device plugin and a PyTorch CUDA test Job. The guide focuses on a transparent dev sandbox for debugging GPU workloads rather than a production-ready design.

hareshgowri announces a preview feature in Microsoft Fabric that lets you ingest CSV and Parquet files directly from OneLake into Materialized Lake Views, turning the bronze layer into a declarative step. The post shows the SQL syntax, schema modes, lineage tracking, and refresh options for building end-to-end medallion pipelines.

mk_sunitha introduces Fabric App functions (preview), a TypeScript-based serverless capability for Fabric Apps that lets builders run secure server-side logic, use application authentication to access downstream resources, and manage secrets safely. The post also shows how to scaffold, debug, and deploy functions, including using GitHub Copilot in VS Code.

sergeig888 announces the general availability of Microsoft Fabric “My workspace” governance improvements, including new admin REST APIs for granting and revoking temporary admin access and guidance for restoring orphaned workspaces after a user is deleted in Microsoft Entra ID.

robece-msft announces updates to Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Hub, including generally available Business Events and new Fabric Events capabilities. The post explains how governed, versioned event contracts help teams validate integrations early, route and transform signals, retain events for analysis in Eventhouse, and react to operational changes like capacity pressure and item lifecycle events.

sbaynes introduces StudentSim, a research system that trains personalized AI “student simulators” from de-identified learner records to evaluate and improve AI tutors before running costly human studies. The post explains how the simulators are measured, trained, and used as a feedback signal for tutor optimization across chess, writing, and math.

pankajarora announces a preview refresh of the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics app, adding new health, compute, and storage visuals plus an item details page to help capacity admins spot throttling, investigate high CU usage, and review 14-day item history across Fabric capacities.

Wuyi Weng shows how to run Qwen3.8-Flash-Next across two H100 GPUs on an Azure Spot VM, then instrument and troubleshoot it with OpenTelemetry, Application Insights/Azure Monitor, and Grafana. The post focuses on KV-cache behavior under agentic load, dashboard pitfalls, and a vLLM KV-cache FP8 setting that improves concurrency and time-to-first-token.

TwinkleCyril announces general availability of Custom SQL Pools in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse, explaining how admins can isolate workloads, cap compute allocation per pool, and classify requests by statement type (SELECT vs NONSELECT) to protect interactive reporting from heavy ingestion and transformation activity.

This week's ML roundup focuses on making scalable ML and agentic systems easier to operate inside governed Azure environments. We cover Anyscale on Azure reaching GA for Ray workloads on AKS with enterprise controls, plus Azure Databricks updates that target high-volume data movement, orchestration clarity, and cost visibility. On the analytics side, Fabric and OneLake guidance ties agent reliability to governed semantics and retrieval (RAG), while performance and architecture notes highlight ways to reduce load on operational systems and keep feedback loops fast.

Wiliam_Rosa explains how to get earlier, more actionable cost visibility in Azure Databricks using tags, Unity Catalog system tables, account-level budgets, and scheduled SQL alerts—plus Azure-specific features like serverless usage policies that propagate tags into Azure Cost Analysis.

John Savill runs through the Azure Weekly Update for 9th October 2026, covering a set of platform changes and retirements across AKS, App Service, developer environments, networking/WAF, API Management, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and Fabric/OneLake, plus a security-focused note on Always Encrypted with Intel SGX enclaves.

Wiliam_Rosa breaks down Databricks’ LTAP Direct Writes (beta) for Azure Databricks Lakebase Postgres, explaining how it shifts bulk-load work off the primary to avoid impacting live OLTP traffic. The post covers the architecture, key mechanics (sandboxed Postgres, COPY FREEZE, WAL handoff), and shows CLI/SDK examples for creating and monitoring Synced Tables.

Rafia Aqil lays out a practical, end-to-end troubleshooting approach for slow Oracle-to-Power BI refresh and query performance, covering provider choice, FetchSize, query folding, Import vs DirectQuery trade-offs, gateway considerations, and when to shift to Microsoft Fabric Mirroring and OneLake for a different analytics architecture.

Anna Hoffman recaps the key Microsoft SQL announcements shared at SQLCon/FabCon Barcelona 2026, covering hybrid and migration updates, Database Hub changes, Hyperscale improvements, SQL DB in Fabric updates, and developer-focused tooling and agent-related updates.

Wiliam_Rosa explains Azure Databricks Lakeflow Jobs “Multiple Triggers” (beta), showing how to run a single job from several conditions (schedule, file arrival, table/model updates) and how to configure, monitor, and reason about concurrency and idempotency when triggers overlap.

bobmital announces the general availability of Anyscale on Azure, a managed Ray runtime that runs on Azure Kubernetes Service in the customer’s subscription. The post explains the control-plane/data-plane split, Azure-native identity and governance integration, private connectivity options, and the kinds of AI/ML workloads teams can run end-to-end.

Microsoft Developer explains why an AI agent’s output quality depends on the context you can retrieve at runtime, and shows how Foundry IQ-style capabilities connect agents to enterprise data, ground responses, and enable actions across business workflows.

Samu Niemelä shares practical takeaways from FabCon 2026 on how Microsoft Fabric is maturing, from Fabric IQ grounding Copilot and agents in governed business semantics to new on-demand compute and stronger monitoring and governance features for running Fabric at scale.

NehaNellepalli outlines an architecture for building a reusable analytics layer around Odoo without modifying the ERP, using Azure Data Factory ingestion into ADLS Gen2, Databricks/Spark transformations, and Synapse/SQL modeling for governed Power BI reporting with row-level security.

This week's ML roundup centers on a practical shift toward governed, inspectable AI systems where semantics, permissions, and operational telemetry live close to the data. Microsoft Fabric doubled down on being the context and governance layer for Copilot and custom agents (via Fabric IQ, ontologies, OneLake controls, and scale tooling), while Azure SQL brought DiskANN-based vector indexing to GA to simplify retrieval next to transactional data. On the model side, Azure AI Foundry Model Router put measurable economics (quality, cost, latency) into routing decisions, and Azure Databricks highlighted unified pipelines, SQL-first AI decision patterns, and cost visibility. We also saw science-focused agent work (Microsoft Discovery and Research Quine) that treats reproducibility, tool traceability, and validation checkpoints as non-negotiable design requirements.

John Savill recaps major Microsoft AI announcements from September 2026, focusing on Azure AI Foundry updates (models, routing, agent features, and controls), Copilot platform changes, and developer-facing items like GitHub Copilot and VS Code agent workflows, plus data/AI additions such as Azure SQL vector capabilities.

Microsoft Developer explains how to evaluate Azure AI Foundry Model Router against a baseline model (for example GPT-5) to understand cost, latency, and quality trade-offs, using the open-source Model Router Auto Evaluation toolkit and its HTML dashboard output.

Microsoft Developer hosts a Data Exposed episode with the Azure SQL product management and engineering team, explaining how Azure SQL Database Hyperscale implements vector indexing (DiskANN) to support fast approximate vector search, filtering, and DML at scale, including billion-row scenarios and GA availability.

rickliev outlines Microsoft’s message for TM Forum Innovate Americas 2026: scaling agentic AI in telecom depends on trusted, governed data plus shared operational context. The post connects “agent-ready” data concepts (meaning, provenance, permissions) with Microsoft Fabric capabilities like OneLake, Fabric IQ, and Real-Time Intelligence.

Wiliam_Rosa breaks down Lakeflow in Azure Databricks, explaining how it unifies ingestion, transformation, and orchestration, and why Unity Catalog-based governance and lineage can reduce the “glue work” of multi-tool data engineering stacks.

Christine Caggiano explains how a multidisciplinary team used the Microsoft Discovery app to design an inspectable, reproducible bioinformatics workflow for phage therapy—connecting curated literature, genomic analysis, and external tools via MCP-based adapters, with validation steps and safety checks built into each stage.

sbaynes describes how the Microsoft Discovery app can help scientists and data teams design an inspectable, reproducible bioinformatics workflow for phage therapy research, from profiling antibiotic resistance and bacterial defenses to searching environmental metagenomic data and ranking candidate phages with traceable evidence and validation steps.

varghesejoji introduces a local “Assessment & Optimization Workbench” that pulls together Azure billing and Databricks workspace evidence so teams can review Databricks cost drivers, utilization, job health, and selected posture checks. It walks through the UI workflow (configure, validate, run, visualize, export) and how to build and run it locally.

Wiliam Rosa explains how to use Azure Databricks ai_query to run a “decision model” (closed-set classification with probabilities) directly from SQL against Unity Catalog-governed tables, avoiding chat-style outputs and extra orchestration. The post covers required warehouse/runtime constraints, structured return types, hosting options, and governance caveats in Unity Gateway.

sbaynes introduces Quine, a Microsoft Research system that combines a multimodal “world model” of biology with an interactive harness that connects models, scientific tools, literature, and wet-lab workflows to speed up biological discovery and hypothesis testing.

shireesht summarizes FabCon EU and SQLCon 2026 announcements across Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft SQL, including Fabric Apps for building governed data-backed apps, Database Hub for centralized estate management, and preview “database agents” plus Azure SQL updates like DiskANN vector indexing for RAG scenarios.

bogdanc summarizes the Fabric Analytics announcements from FabCon Europe 2026, covering Fabric IQ’s GA in Copilot experiences, new Power BI app-building capabilities, GPU-accelerated query execution for Fabric Data Warehouse, and expanded governance controls (labels, DLP, and Copilot restrictions) across the Fabric stack.

Faisal Mohamood summarizes the FabCon/SQLCon Barcelona 2026 announcements for Fabric Data Factory, covering new mirroring sources, multicloud data distribution improvements, faster and more reusable transformations (Power Query, Dataflow Gen2, notebooks, dbt), richer monitoring, and MCP-based AI assistance across authoring and operations.