Blog
Field notes from the engineers.
Databricks, Temporal, durable execution, applied AI, and what happens when those systems meet real production load. Written by the people doing the work.
Margin notes from the Databricks Field Guide
All margin notesShort takes on what Databricks just shipped and what we read into it, published on the Field Guide.
- Sep 23, 2026 · Preetham Reddy
Databricks will keep your agent's memory, in Postgres
Managed agent memory and sessions are in beta, both backed by Lakebase and usable from any framework. The state layer teams were building by hand.
Read on the Field Guide - Sep 13, 2026 · Preetham Reddy
You can now share data you never loaded into Databricks
OpenSharing now shares foreign Iceberg tables and foreign schemas federated from other systems, and the provider pays the compute cost
Read on the Field Guide - Sep 13, 2026 · Preetham Reddy
LTAP Direct Writes is the first piece of the one-copy claim you can measure
LTAP Direct Writes, in beta since 25 August 2026, loads synced tables by writing to storage instead of through compute. The first LTAP claim a team can time.
Read on the Field Guide
68 posts
Business Central reporting: built-in, Power BI or lakehouse
Three ways to report on Dynamics 365 Business Central, what each one is good for, the limits Microsoft documents, and how to tell which one you need.
Preetham Reddy · 6 minKnowledge ShareAzureDatabricksReadAn AI governance framework is four answers you can query
The EU moved its high-risk AI deadline to December 2027. What NIST AI RMF, ISO 42001 and the EU AI Act ask, mapped to controls you can run on Databricks.
Preetham Reddy · 9 minKnowledge ShareAI/MLDatabricksReadLakeWright.NET carries a SaaS tenant boundary into Databricks
An Apache-2.0 .NET kit that resolves the customer tenant before a request reaches Databricks SQL, Jobs, AI/BI, Genie or Model Serving.
Ivan Vydrin · 7 minDatabricksKnowledge ShareReadTechFabric engineer named a winner in Databricks' Genie-Powered App Challenge
Prove It, by TechFabric engineer Ivan Vydrin, won in the Creativity & Originality track of Databricks' global Genie-Powered App Challenge, judged by Databricks.
TechFabric · 2 minDatabricksNewsReadEmbedded analytics on Databricks, part 1
One ticket, one platform, and the cheapest first step. Moving a B2B product's client reporting onto Databricks, starting with Lakehouse Federation.
Andrey Taran · 4 minDatabricksField NotesReadDynamics NAV support ends in January 2028
Microsoft's extended support for Dynamics NAV 2018 ends on 12 January 2028. What moving to Business Central involves, and why the warehouse floor sets the size.
TechFabric · 4 minWhat We DoReadFabric or Databricks is the wrong question on Azure
Microsoft and Databricks shipped the interop this year. For teams already on Azure the question is which platform holds the tables and which one reads them.
Sushruth Aeluguri · 9 minDatabricksAzureKnowledge ShareReadThe lock-in argument for leaving Snowflake is over
Snowflake and Databricks now read and write each other's Iceberg tables. If a vendor is still selling you a migration on lock-in, they are selling you 2023.
Sushruth Aeluguri · 7 minDatabricksKnowledge ShareReadExport to Data Lake stops on 30 November
Export to Data Lake stops permanently on 30 November 2026. Microsoft names two replacements for Dynamics 365 teams. There is a third answer.
Sushruth Aeluguri · 8 minDatabricksAzureKnowledge ShareReadThe pipeline was fine. The data was three days old.
Every job green, nothing failing, and the numbers quietly wrong because a source stopped sending. Freshness, volume and schema checks in Unity Catalog.
Sushruth Aeluguri · 3 minDatabricksKnowledge ShareReadPaying frontier prices to rename a variable
Smart routing in Unity AI Gateway labels a coding task before picking a model. The cost headline is fine. The traces are the part worth reading.
Preetham Reddy · 3 minDatabricksAI/MLReadNobody wanted to run the migration on a Friday
Staging has ten thousand rows, production has forty million, and every migration is a guess. What Lakebase branching does to a team's calendar.
Raja Vemuri · 2 minDatabricksKnowledge ShareReadUnity Catalog before the first pipeline
Lakehouse pilots skip grants and then cannot be handed to security. The Lakehouse Launchpad puts Unity Catalog first, with TechFabric Airlift underneath.
Sushruth Aeluguri · 3 minDatabricksKnowledge ShareReadThe cost dashboard said the workspace was fine
A Databricks cost dashboard shows spend. A two-week Health Check finds the spend that bought nothing, from all-purpose clusters to orphaned schedules.
Ihor Seleznov · 3 minDatabricksKnowledge ShareReadFour thousand objects and nobody would name the exclusions
Warehouse migrations slip because the exclusions were never written down. The Migration Readiness Sprint inventories the estate before anyone picks a date.
Preetham Reddy · 3 minDatabricksKnowledge ShareReadFinance said ninety days. Operations said open account.
Genie fails when two teams mean different things by the same word. Genie Accuracy hardens the semantic layer. TechFabric Experiments keeps the suite running.
Andrew Ripley · 3 minDatabricksAI/MLKnowledge ShareReadNobody could tell whether the agent was any good
A team shipped an agent in nine days and argued for two months about whether its answers were right. Write down what a good answer is first.
Preetham Reddy · 4 minAI/MLDatabricksKnowledge ShareReadUsing PyTest for Data Quality Checks Directly within Databricks
Writing PyTest data quality checks inside Databricks notebooks. Bronze-to-silver validation, edge cases, fixtures and error handling, with examples.
Ihor Seleznov · 4 minDatabricksDurable ExecutionReadHow QA Engineers Can Use Databricks Repos for Better Test Automation Workflows
Moving QA off ad-hoc notebooks and onto version-controlled test automation with Databricks Repos. Repo structure, modular tests, and how a team works in one.
Ihor Seleznov · 4 minDatabricksDurable ExecutionKnowledge ShareWorkflowsReadGovernance You Can Actually Ship
AI governance fails when it lives in documents instead of infrastructure. Compliance comes from systems that enforce the rules while the model is running.
TechFabric · 8 minField NotesDatabricksReadThe Agent That Deleted Production
Enterprise software fails when IT mandates tools people do not want. Adoption comes from pull, and the same rule now applies to agents.
TechFabric · 9 minField NotesReadThe Most Expensive Software Nobody Uses
Companies spend millions on enterprise AI that employees barely touch while shadow AI spreads. The problem is the tools, not the people ignoring them.
TechFabric · 9 minField NotesReadThe Forward-Deployed Playbook
AI changed build versus buy. Now it is changing delivery. Small teams of senior engineers embedded in your operations, shipping in weeks rather than months.
TechFabric · 12 minField NotesReadWhat If Agile Was the Detour?
Agile answered expensive execution, not planning. As AI collapses build time, deep upfront specification plus fast execution ships in weeks.
TechFabric · 12 minField NotesReadAgentic Systems Without the Chaos: Building AI That Stays on the Rails
The engineering patterns that keep an autonomous system reliable in production. Guardrails, observability, circuit breakers, and where each one belongs.
TechFabric · 15 minField NotesReadThe Build vs. Buy Decision for Enterprise AI (When Off-the-Shelf Fails You)
Faster models and larger context windows make a custom AI build viable in weeks, and data sovereignty exposes vendor limits. When to buy, build, or do both.
TechFabric · 9 minField NotesReadHow to reach a new market without rebuilding your core platform
Mature platforms stall because onboarding smaller customers gets expensive, not because of scale. Changing access rather than the core can restart growth.
TechFabric · 7 minField NotesReadWhat Teams Get Wrong About Outages and Operational Risk
Cloudflare, AWS and Azure all go down, and no internal engineering effort prevents it. What a dependent service should be doing while it waits.
TechFabric · 3 minField NotesWhat We DoCloudReadDASF - Databricks AI Security Framework
DASF is the Databricks AI Security Framework, a map of 62 AI risks and their controls. What it covers, and how to put those controls in the runtime.
Preetham Reddy · 2 minDatabricksReadBeyond basic data catalogs: how Unity Catalog solves real enterprise governance challenges
Unity Catalog is the permission boundary we refuse to route around. A Health Check finds coverage that stops halfway, and agents inherit a person's grants.
Preetham Reddy · 3 minDatabricksReadMigrating from Legacy Data Warehouses to Databricks Data & AI Platform
Warehouse migrations slip on scope, not conversion. Two weeks on TechFabric Airlift inventories the estate, agrees exclusions and hands you a wave plan.
Preetham Reddy · 3 minDatabricksReadFrom Data Warehouses to Data Intelligence: Why Your Next Platform Choice Will Define the Next Decade
Transform your data strategy: From warehouses to AI-powered intelligence platforms. Discover why your platform choice defines the next decade.
Preetham Reddy · 5 minDatabricksAI/MLReadDriving Real-World Value with Intelligent Business Intelligence, BI in the era of AI
Databricks AI/BI in practice. Conversational analytics, semantic understanding, and dashboards people actually open.
Preetham Reddy · 5 minDatabricksApplied AIAI/MLReadRethink AI: Building a Horizontal Layer for Enterprise-Wide Transformation
Treating AI as a horizontal layer across the business rather than a single-app use case, and what that changes about operations and efficiency.
John Bellaud · 5 minAI/MLThought LeadershipApplied AIWorkflowsReadUsing Application Insights as a Sink for logging in ASP.NET Core
ASP.NET Core has very extensible logging interface. I provides an ILogger interface along with few default implementations that can be used to log data.
TechFabric · 3 minKnowledge ShareReadIntroducing Azure AI Foundry: A CTO's Guide to Starting and Scaling AI
A CTO's guide to Azure AI Foundry. Pre-trained models, fine-tuning them for your business, and deploying AI securely once it works.
John Bellaud · 5 minAI/MLAzureNewsThought LeadershipReadUsing Traefik Reverse Proxy For Securing Microservices On Azure Service Fabric
Securing microservices on Azure Service Fabric with a Traefik reverse proxy. Service Fabric is Microsoft's answer to Docker Swarm and Kubernetes.
Preetham Reddy · 15 minKnowledge ShareAzureReadTaking The Mystery Out Of Microsoft Azure And What It Can Do For Your Business
What Microsoft Azure actually does for a business, in plain terms. Growth, cost and efficiency, without the platform vocabulary.
TechFabric · 5 minCloudDatabricksAzureReadSetting Up Production Ready Infrastructure For Microservices
Service Fabric is Microsoft's microservices orchestrator. Service discovery, fault tolerance and containers, set up for production rather than a demo.
Preetham Reddy · 6 minKnowledge ShareAzureRead3 Ways To Run Automated Tests On Azure DevOps
Unit tests on the CI build, Selenium UI tests in the release pipeline, and Test Plans on demand. Three approaches on Azure DevOps, with the YAML for each.
Ihor Seleznov · 24 minKnowledge ShareAzureReadFrom Spreadsheet to System: How We Automated Our Internal Processes with Microsoft Dynamics
TechFabric ran on spreadsheets with a team of eight. What we replaced them with in Microsoft Dynamics, and what we learned building it on ourselves.
TechFabric · 4 minWhat We DoReadAI at Scale: Managing Cloud Multi-Tenant AI Infrastructure with Temporal
Scaling, cost and security in a multi-tenant AI application. How TechFabric uses Temporal to orchestrate the infrastructure workflows underneath.
Sergey Ustimenko · 6 minTemporalAI/MLApplied AICloudKnowledge ShareWorkflowsDurable ExecutionReadSupply Chain: Building it Stronger, Smarter and Faster using SmartCert
SmartCert solves a long-standing supply chain problem in a way few products do. What it is, how it works, and the question it keeps raising.
Leo Oliemans · 4 minCloudReadOff the Shelf vs. Custom Software: Selecting the Optimal CRM for your Business
Picking a CRM between off-the-shelf and custom. Where each one fits, what the switching costs are, and the questions that decide it.
TechFabric · 5 minCloudReadHow We Created A Multi-Tenant, Multi-Cloud, & Multi-Model AI Platform with Temporal, Fiber Copilot
How we built Fiber Copilot, a multi-tenant, multi-cloud and multi-model AI Ops platform for standing up chatbots and copilots quickly.
Preetham Reddy · 6 minAI/MLTemporalDatabricksReadDurable RAG with Temporal and Chainlit
Calling different tools from RAG pipeline can be difficult. This blog post describes how to use temporal for durable execution of RAG tools in Chainlit.
Sergey Ustimenko · 15 minAI/MLKnowledge ShareTemporalApplied AIReadUsing Custom Software Development Data For supply Chain Optimization
Demand for Microsoft Dynamics 365 in supply chain is rising on data analysis and automation in logistics, and on partnerships that keep it consistent.
Leo Oliemans · 3 minKnowledge ShareReadSupply Chain Optimization: Do I Innovate, Or Do I Wait?
Supply chain optimization rewards the companies that move and punishes the ones that wait. How to tell which position you are actually in.
Leo Oliemans · 2 minKnowledge ShareReadDynamics 365 CRM: Transforming Your Sales Quote Process
How to set up quoting in Dynamics 365 with quote templates, price lists and approval rules. It also covers quote-to-order and storing quotes in SharePoint.
TechFabric · 10 minWhat We DoKnowledge ShareReadWhat Every CTO Needs To Know About Databricks
A CTO's guide to Databricks and what it does with big data. Learn essential strategies to maximize your data potential and drive innovation.
John Bellaud · 5 minDatabricksAI/MLWhat We DoReadWhy business can't afford to ignore generative AI: 10 benefits that matter
Ten reasons enterprises adopt generative AI, starting with automating work, improving decisions and producing ideas a team would not have reached.
John Bellaud · 10 minKnowledge ShareAI/MLReadUI/UX at Scale: It's Time To Move to Design Systems
Design systems let a company scale its front end without the styling drifting. Why more organizations are moving to one, and what it takes.
Sam Salima · 4 minDesignReadTransform Your Data Visibility, Transform Your Organization
Data rich, insight poor. Collecting data has never been easier, and it is worth nothing until your organization can read something out of it.
TechFabric · 8 minWhat We DoReadThe Power of Data, AI and Digital Transformation
Digital work shortens the road to a product launch. An agile MVP gets something in front of customers sooner and reaches more of them.
Leo Oliemans · 7 minCloudAI/MLReadThe Imperative of Durable Execution in App Dev: Unveiling Temporal's Framework
Why durable execution matters, and how Temporal keeps a distributed application running through the failures that would otherwise lose its work.
John Bellaud · 4 minThought LeadershipTemporalDurable ExecutionWorkflowsReadThe Effects Of Cypress Component Testing On Your React App
What Cypress component testing does to a React codebase, and how developers and automation engineers working together cuts the cost of fixing things later.
Ihor Seleznov · 10 minKnowledge ShareReactReadTemporal: Airlines Booking Demo Application
The key concepts of Temporal, shown through an airline ticket booking demo. How the framework makes a complex workflow straightforward to build.
TechFabric · 10 minKnowledge ShareTemporalCloudWorkflowsDurable ExecutionReadSecure Microservices Infrastructure Architecture by Design
Security in a microservices architecture, designed in rather than added afterwards. What changes once an application is many services instead of one.
Preetham Reddy · 3 minCloudReadRobotic Automation: The Future Of Supply Chain Optimization
Robotics automation technologies are already transforming the world of supply chain dynamics across nearly every business sector and industry.
Leo Oliemans · 5 minCloudReadMastering the Art of Prompt Engineering for Generative AI
Prompt engineering is writing precise instructions and then iterating on what comes back. How to get accurate, original output from a generative model.
Leo Oliemans · 3 minAI/MLReadIt's Time To Move Your Company To The Cloud: Here's Why
Cloud removes the physical servers and the data centre. Cost, flexibility, elasticity and resource use, and why waiting has stopped paying.
TechFabric · 10 minWhat We DoReadIndustry Turning Point: Large Language Models (LLMs)
What large language models are, how they understand and generate text, and what they change about the way people reach information at work.
John Bellaud · 6 minKnowledge ShareAI/MLReadHow Temporal Has Transformed My Development Approach
What changed after adopting Temporal. Less boilerplate, workflow state that survives a restart, and a different way of thinking about long-running work.
Tyler Harker · 3 minTemporalKnowledge ShareThought LeadershipWorkflowsReadHiring Databricks Specialists: 12 Expert Insights You Need to Get it Right
Twelve things to get right when hiring Databricks specialists in-house, from people who have built the teams and know what they screen for.
John Bellaud · 7 minKnowledge ShareDatabricksWhat We DoReadDynamics 365 CRM - Why Are So Many Companies Migrating To It?
Why companies keep moving to Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, and what changes for sales, service and the reporting that sits over both.
John Bellaud · 5 minWhat We DoCloudReadCreate A Wide Configuration For Running Cypress In GitHub Actions!
A Cypress configuration for GitHub Actions that covers several environments, browsers and resolutions, and drops into an existing CI/CD pipeline.
Ihor Seleznov · 15 minKnowledge ShareReadBreaking Down Silos: Integrating AI Across Business Functions
What happens when AI runs across business functions rather than inside one. Cases from Amazon and KLM, and the obstacles both had to get past.
Leo Oliemans · 4 minAI/MLReadAccelerate automation: what Power Automate does for productivity
Five reasons teams pick Microsoft Power Automate. Pre-built flows, a designer non-engineers can use, and the AI models that come with it.
Karan Sharma · 4 minWhat We DoRead