Category: Microsoft Fabric

Eugene Meidinger covers the news:

There were many announcements last week at FabCon Barcelona. Overall, there was one clear theme: semantic models are as important as ever and have more use cases than ever before.

• You can do more with Fabric Apps soon. They will be included with Pro and PPU licenses, along with Fabric SQL DBs (up to 1 GB).
• Microsoft has officially committed to the Apache Ossie format as a vendor-neutral way of defining semantic models. A very early two-way converter is up on GitHub.
• Semantic meaning will be able to live in your Fabric lakehouse with semantic views. This will make it easier to define business meaning closer to the data.
• Fabric ontologies can now use DAX measures as explicit metrics and can be created from multiple semantic models.

Additionally, Microsoft has shown a clear and continued commitment to supporting AI agents for Power BI report development, Fabric App development, and semantic modeling. Expect this to continue into the future.

Click through for a dive into some of these topics.

Meagan Longoria has a list:

Policies were much needed. Until now, many Fabric capabilities were controlled by tenant switches that enable a feature for everyone or restrict it for everyone. Nothing was this fine-grained, which created blind spots and admin headaches. Fabric Policies let admins define who can perform an action, what the rule covers, and where it applies. If no rule matches, the action is denied.

The first three policy types are:

• Item creation (capacity scope): controls who can create specific item types in workspaces on a capacity.
• Edit workspace settings (tenant scope): controls who can change security-sensitive workspace settings, such as network security and customer-managed keys.
• External data sharing (tenant scope): controls who can share data externally, from which workspaces, for which sensitivity labels, and to which recipient domains.

Policies are stored in Policy Set items and managed in the Policies Center in the OneLake catalog. They support public APIs and Git integration, and policy changes are recorded in the Microsoft 365 audit log.

Click through for all ten.

Reitse Eskens gives it a try:

You can compare it to Serverless SQL databases: when it’s not in use, it won’t cost anything. Storage will always incur some cost, but no compute.
First, be aware that there are no reservations (reserve plans soon) available. Second, pricing to use items will differ from the regular capacities. Some items may have the same price; others will be calculated at x2 or x3. We have to wait for the official documentation to find out what the actual prices will be.

Right now, we don’t know what the cost will look like, though once the documentation is available, we should have a better idea. Assuming it’s not in some inscrutable units.