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Category: Deployment

Power BI Version Control via Azure DevOps

Published 2026-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers works with the on-again, off-again CI/CD solution Microsoft has to offer:

In this blog post is a way set up version control for Power BI semantic models (and reports) using the PBIP (Power BI Project) format, Azure DevOps (Azure Repos), and VS Code.

This approach treats your semantic model as readable text files (JSON/TMDL), enabling proper Git diffing, branching, merging, and collaboration—something binary .pbix files don’t support well.

Click through for the process.

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Deploy Microsoft Fabric Items with fabric-cicd in Azure DevOps

Published 2026-03-10 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant announces a new Azure DevOps extension:

This post covers how you can simplify Microsoft Fabric deployments with “Deploy Microsoft Fabric items with fabric-cicd”. Which is an Azure DevOps extension that I recently published.

To manage expectations, this post shows how to start working with the extension and its associated task within the GUI-based classic release pipelines in Azure DevOps. Like in the below screenshot.

Read on to see how the extension works.

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Creating Fabric Linked Service Parameters for ADO Deployment

Published 2026-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck glues together several technologies:

Quite the title, so let me set the stage first. You have an Azure Data Factory instance (or Azure Synapse Pipelines) and you have a couple of linked services that point to Fabric artifacts such as a lakehouse or a warehouse. You want to deploy your ADF instance with an Azure Devops build/release pipeline to another environment (e.g. acceptance or production) and this means the linked services need to change as well because in those environments the lakehouse or warehouse are in a different workspace (and also have different object Ids).

When you want to deploy ADF, you typically use the ARM template that ADF automatically creates when you publish (when your instance is linked with a git repo). More information about this setup can be found in the documentation. To parameterize certain properties of a linked service, you can use custom parameterization of the ARM template. Anyway, long story short, I tried to parameterize the properties of the Fabric linked service. 

Read on to see how that went, as well as what you need to do to solve this issue.

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DevOps in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

Hamish Watson lays out what DevOps means in the context of Microsoft Fabric:

Microsoft Fabric (not to be confused with the more general term “fabric” in DevOps) is an integrated data and analytics platform designed for modern data-driven workloads, such as data engineering, business intelligence, and machine learning. With the introduction of Git integration in Microsoft Fabric, DevOps practices are becoming more accessible in the platform, allowing teams to implement collaborative, automated workflows that are common in DevOps environments.

Read on for some of the high-level concepts of what we do with DevOps and how they apply directly to Microsoft Fabric workspaces.

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A Primer on dbt against DuckDB

Published 2026-02-23 by Kevin Feasel

Robin Moffatt shares a tutorial on dbt:

In 2022 I made a couple of attempts to learn dbt, but it never really ‘clicked’.

I’m rather delighted to say that as of today, dbt has definitely ‘clicked’. How do I know? Because not only can I explain what I’ve built, but I’ve even had the 💡 lightbulb-above-the-head moment seeing it in action and how elegant the code used to build pipelines with dbt can be.

In this blog post I’m going to show off what I built with dbt, contrasting it to my previous hand-built method.

I also had heard of dbt but haven’t really spent the time to learn it because I’m not really a data engineer. But this tutorial has me interested in diving in further.

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Official Support for fabric-cicd Tool

Published 2026-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Yaron Pri Gal announces support for a library:

Today, we’re announcing that fabric‑cicd—the open‑source Python deployment library for Microsoft Fabric—is now an officially supported, Microsoft‑backed tool for CI/CD automation across Fabric workspaces.

Over the past year, fabric‑cicd has rapidly evolved through collaboration with engineering, CAT, MVPs, enterprise customers, and the community. Growing usage, strong sentiment across internal and external channels, and adoption by organizations building enterprise‑grade deployment pipelines helped solidify its value within the Fabric ecosystem.

Read on to learn what this means.

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Modifying an Azure SQL Database with Mirroring to Fabric Enabled

Published 2026-02-12 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt runs into an issue:

Over the past few weeks, I have been doing some experimenting with Azure SQL mirroring to Microsoft Fabric. In the process, I ran into a couple of issues and challenges. In this data recipe, I will be going through one of my challenges when I got Azure SQL mirroring to Microsoft Fabric setup and running.

At first, everything seemed to be working as expected, and the integration felt very smooth. At that point, I continued to develop my test database in Azure SQL to learn a bit more about mirroring. I made a couple of minor changes to my test database and tried to publish them from my SQL Database Project.

Read on for the issue, as well as the solution—that is, assuming you don’t actually want to change any of the things you’re actively moving over into Fabric.

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A Quick Explanation of Terraform and Ansible

Published 2026-01-05 by Kevin Feasel

Amy Abel explains a pair of technologies:

Terraform and Ansible are often mentioned in tech conversations, but DBAs, product teams, and even support staff may not always know what they are or why they matter. Here is a simple way to understand them.

Amy uses the analogy of the crew setting up for a concert. The post doesn’t get into the details of how either technology works, but it does help explain for an outsider why they are interesting technologies to use.

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Connecting Microsoft Fabric to Azure DevOps via Service Principal

Published 2025-12-22 by Kevin Feasel

Yaron Pri Gal doesn’t need no steenkin’ passwords:

Following Azure DevOps Service Principal & Cross Tenant Support (Generally Available) announcement for service principal and cross-tenant support – Microsoft Fabric Git Integration with Azure DevOps (ADO), this blog post serves as a guide to connecting Fabric workspaces to Azure DevOps repositories using service principal.

Fabric Git Integration is the foundation for organizations implementing fully automated CI/CD pipelines, enabling seamless movement of assets across Development, Test, and Production environments.

Currently, Fabric Git Integration supports two major Git providers: Azure DevOps and GitHub. This blog post addresses the new service principal capability for Azure DevOps.

Click through for more info and a link to Microsoft Learn that contains the instructions.

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