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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Proactive Monitoring in Microsoft Fabric via Activator

Published 2025-04-10 by Kevin Feasel

Someleze Diko shows off a powerful feature in Microsoft Fabric:

Driving actions from real-time organizational data is important for making informed data-driven decisions and improving overall efficiency. By leveraging data effectively, organizations can gain insights into customer behaviour, operational performance, and market trends, enabling them to respond promptly to emerging issues and opportunities.

Setting alerts on KQL queries can significantly enhance this proactive approach, especially in scenarios such as customer support. For instance, by monitoring key metrics like response times, ticket volumes, and satisfaction scores, support teams can identify patterns and anomalies that may indicate underlying problems.

This helps drive home an important mental shift around “real-time intelligence.” Ignoring my standard disdain for misuse of the term “real-time,” most people will ignore the feature because of a perfectly reasonable belief: my data doesn’t come in that frequently, so I don’t really need to process it in near-real-time. But the real-time intelligence functionality isn’t necessarily just about loading in your data and making it available to users faster. Instead, think of it as acting immediately when your data does change, especially if you have multiple sources of data loading at different times during the day.

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Transmitting Printed Data in Notebooks

Published 2025-04-09 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld provides a public service announcement:

When working with Notebooks in Microsoft Fabric, exporting and reusing them across environments or tenants might seem like a harmless, even convenient, task. Whether you’re sharing a template with a colleague, moving assets between workspaces, or contributing to the community — the last thing you’d expect is to accidentally include data along with your code.

But that’s exactly what can happen.

For people who have worked with Jupyter notebooks in the past, this is a fairly obvious result. But if you aren’t familiar with the platform, that idea may seem weird. Marc does provide some options for exporting notebook contents, and you can also clear the cell contents before exporting.

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CI/CD Announcements during FabCon

Published 2025-04-08 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant keeps us up to date:

Microsoft Fabric Variable libraries were announced during the keynote at the Microsoft Fabric community conference. Which caused some excitement.

Variable libraries are an upcoming preview item that will enable developers to manage configurations within a workspace. Reducing the need for custom development work after deployments.

You will be able to achieve this by creating a Variable library in each workspace. From there, configure the individual variables for that workspace. Improving your CI/CD experience.

Click through to see more about that, as well as several other interesting announcements.

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FabCon Announcements for DAX and Semantic Models

Published 2025-04-07 by Kevin Feasel

Marco Russo summarizes the announcements:

I usually do not write about announcements and new features until we have had time to try and test them in the real world. However, there are always exceptions, and some of the announcements at the Microsoft Fabric Conference 2025 fall into this category because I have worked with them enough to provide hands-on feedback.

In short, these are the topics I am covering in this blog post:

  • Direct Lake and Import mode
  • Calendars in DAX
  • User-Defined Functions (UDF) in DAX

These weren’t the headline-grabbers of the conference, but Marco explains the importance behind each of them.

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What’s New with OneLake Shortcuts

Published 2025-04-04 by Kevin Feasel

Miquella de Boer gives us an update:

Microsoft Fabric shortcuts enable organizations to unify their data across various domains and clouds by creating a single virtual data lake. These shortcuts act as symbolic links to data in different storage locations, simplifying access and reducing the need for multiple copies.

OneLake serves as the central hub for all analytics data. By using OneLake shortcuts, organizations can connect to existing data sources like Azure and AWS through a unified namespace, streamlining workflows and enhancing collaboration.

Click through for several feature improvements for shortcuts.

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Azure SQL Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric Updates

Published 2025-04-03 by Kevin Feasel

Idris Motiwala announces a set of changes:

Attention data engineers, database developers, and data analysts! We’re pumped to reveal exciting upgrades to Mirroring for Azure SQL Database in Fabric today at the Fabric Conference in Las Vegas 2025. Since it became Generally Available, Mirroring for Azure SQL Database has been a game-changer, letting you replicate data seamlessly and integrate it within the Fabric environment. We’re talking near real-time data accessibility and some serious analytics power!

Click through to see what’s new, as well as what’s upcoming. This is specifically for Azure SQL DB and Azure SQL Managed Instance, versus SQL Server running as an Azure VM or on-premises (or some other cloud), so calibrate expectations accordingly.

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The New Fabric CLI

Published 2025-04-02 by Kevin Feasel

Hasan Abo Shally announces a CLI:

  • The Fabric CLI is now in preview
  • It offers a developer-first, file-system-inspired way to explore and manage Microsoft Fabric
  • Use it interactively or script it into your workflows — from your terminal, in seconds
  • Built on Fabric APIs, designed for automation, and constantly evolving
  • Open source is on the horizon — with plans to empower the community to extend and shape the CLI

Give it a try. Break things. Tell us what you want next.

Click through for the full announcement. The idea here is to be the az cli for Fabric. Between this and Semantic Link Labs, it will make automating tasks in Microsoft Fabric easier.

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Calling a Microsoft Fabric REST API via Azure Data Factory

Published 2025-04-02 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck makes the call:

Suppose you want to call a certain Microsoft Fabric REST API endpoint from Azure Data Factory (or Synapse Pipelines). This can be done using a Web Activity, and most Fabric APIs now support service principals or managed identities. Let’s illustrate with an example. I’m going to call the REST API endpoint to create a new lakehouse. 

Click through for the instructions.

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Deploying and Using Custom Python Libraries in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-04-02 by Kevin Feasel

Miles Cole picks up from part one:

This is part 2 of my prior post that continues where I left off. I previously showed how you can use Resource folders in either the Notebook or Environment in Microsoft Fabric to do some pretty agile development of Python modules/libraries.

Now, how exactly can you package up your code to distribute and leverage it across multiple Workspaces or Environment items? How could we acomplish something like the below?

Read on for the answer.

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