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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Auto-Scale Billing for Spark in Microsoft Fabric now GA

Published 2025-08-01 by Kevin Feasel

Santhosh Kumar Ravindran announces a feature in general availability:

We’re thrilled to announce the general availability (GA) of Autoscale Billing for Apache Spark in Microsoft Fabric — a serverless billing model designed to offer greater flexibility, transparency, and cost efficiency for running Spark workloads at scale.

With this model now fully supported, Spark Jobs can run independently of your Fabric capacity and are billed on a pay-as-you-go basis — similar to how Spark works in Azure Synapse. This gives teams the freedom to scale compute as needed without impacting other workloads running on your shared Fabric capacity.

I’m of two minds here. On the one hand, there is value to having this as an option. On the other hand, one of the talking points for Microsoft Fabric is that you have one billing model. But because it’s an optional thing you can enable rather than something you must use, I’m fine with it.

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Microsoft Fabric Features for July 2025

Published 2025-07-31 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick LeBlanc has an update for us:

Welcome to the July 2025 Fabric Feature Summary! This month’s update covers major events like the return of the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Vienna, and the 10th anniversary of Power BI. Key platform enhancements include new domain tags and updates to the default category in the OneLake catalog. You’ll also find highlights on data science developments, such as Fabric data agent integration with Microsoft Copilot Studio. Explore the innovations shaping the future of Fabric in this month’s edition.

Read on for a long list of new and updated features.

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JSON Lines Support in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-07-30 by Kevin Feasel

Jovan Popovic makes an announcement:

We’re happy to announce the preview of JSON Lines (JSONL) support in the OPENROWSET(BULK) function for Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse and SQL endpoints for Lakehouses.

The OPENROWSET(BULK) function allows you to query external data stored in the lake using well-known T-SQL syntax. With this update, you can now also query files in JSON Lines format, expanding the range of supported formats and simplifying access to semi-structured data.

Click through to see it in action.

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Fabric Studio 2.0 Released

Published 2025-07-29 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl has an update:

7 months after the first official release of Fabric Studio, I am very happy to share the I just released the next major version with a lot of new features that make working with Microsoft Fabric from VSCode better and more intuitive than ever! The release includes some new capabilities that I wanted to get into the tool since the very beginning but back then the APIs just weren’t there yet. Finally they are and I integrated them into Fabric Studio v2.0!

Click through for a quick changelog, a link to the full changelog, and where you can grab a copy of the Visual Studio Code extension.

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Optimizing Multi-Notebook Jobs in Microsoft Fabric and AWS Glue

Published 2025-07-24 by Kevin Feasel

Daniel Janik flips a switch:

Are your Azure Fabric pipelines with multiple notebooks running slower than you’d like? Are you paying for more Spark compute time than you should be? The culprit might be a simple setting that’s easy to miss. In this blog post, we’ll dive into the “For pipeline running multiple notebooks” setting in Azure Fabric and explain why enabling it can significantly improve your pipeline’s performance and reduce your costs.

Click through for this, as well as a comparison with AWS Glue and ways to perform something similar there.

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Goodbye, Default Semantic Models

Published 2025-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Pradeep Srikakolapu makes an announcement:

Microsoft Fabric is officially sunsetting Default Semantic Models. This change is part of our ongoing efforts to simplify and improve the manageability, deployment, and governance of Fabric items such as warehouse, lakehouse, SQL database, and mirrored databases.

This is definitely a good thing. The idea of a default semantic model wasn’t bad, especially early on in Microsoft Fabric’s development life. But those default models almost never had enough information to do what customers actually want, so they would sit there as a distraction.

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The Microsoft Fabric Service Status Page

Published 2025-07-22 by Kevin Feasel

Brent Ozar notes a new status page:

I’ve been pretty vocal here on the blog and on social media about the reliability problems with Microsoft Fabric. Today, I’ve got good news: Microsoft released a new Fabric status page and a known issues page, something that really does take guts given the current reliability situation.

It’ll be important to see how frequently they update this status page and if the page displays sufficient information on issues in a timely manner. But this is a good starting point.

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