data systems, performance, and the details that matter

Fabric Announcements at Build '24

With Microsoft Build 2024 underway, the wave of announcements are hot off the press! This is a recap of some of the data engineering specific updates that I’m particularly excited about.

Generative AI and Spark: Leveraging LLMs for Accelerated Migrations

LLMs like ChatGPT and CoPilot are transforming every industry, so why not use them as a data engineer to free up time for more complex tasks? One thing every data engineer—and most humans—are revolted by is repetitive tasks. Thankfully, we don’t live in the world of iRobot and all we need are tokens to pay the LLM masters to get our work done.

The Fabric Concurrency Showdown: RunMultiple vs. ThreadPools

I recently blogged about cluster configuration options in Spark and how you can maximize compute utilization and processing time. Of the many options that I listed and data provided, I never gave any benchmarks comparing RunMultiple and Multithreading. The goal of this post is exactly that, drilling into real data that pushes the concurrency limits of both. Going forward I’ll reference Multithreading simply as ThreadPools since that is the specific Multithreading implementation that I’ll be testing.