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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric February 2025 Feature Round-Up

Published 2025-02-27 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick LeBlanc tells us what’s new:

There are a lot of exciting features for you this month! Here are some highlights: In Power BI, Explore from Copilot visual answers which lets you do easy ad-hoc exploration. In Data Warehouse, Browse files with OPENROWSET (Preview) and Copilot for Data Warehouse Chat (Preview). For Data Science, AI Skill is now conversational.

These are just some of the great features this month, keep reading to learn about all of what’s happened in Fabric this month.

Click through for the full report.

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Microsoft Fabric Quotas

Published 2025-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Mihir Wagle puts the kibosh on things:

On February 24, 2025, we launched Microsoft Fabric Quotas, a new feature designed to control resource governance for the acquisition of your Microsoft Fabric capacities. Fabric quotas aimed at helping customers ensure that Fabric resources are used efficiently and help manage the overall performance and reliability of the Azure platform while preventing misuse.

Note that these are not quotas you set on your users, but rather quotas that Microsoft sets on you.

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Power BI Semantic Model Monthly Refresh via Fabric Data Pipelines

Published 2025-02-25 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb has another way for scheduling refreshes:

I’m sure you already know how to configure scheduled refresh for your semantic models in Power BI. While the options you have for controlling when refresh takes place are generally good enough – you can configure daily or weekly refreshes and set up to eight times a day for refreshes to take place – there are some scenarios it doesn’t work for, such as monthly refreshes. Up to now the workaround has been to use Power Automate to trigger refreshes (see here for an example) or to call the refresh API from another application. Now, with Fabric, you have a much better option for scheduling refreshes: Data Pipelines.

Click through for the demonstration.

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Microsoft Fabric Permissions Models for Sharing Data with End Users

Published 2025-02-24 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge builds a list:

Consider the following scenario:

  • I am building a data platform on Microsoft Fabric, using Lakehouses as the primary storage engine.
  • My end users need to consume data from the data platform as users of Power BI reports which connects to data from the Lakehouses, as developers of ad hoc models and report using data from the Lakehouses, and through ad hoc SQL queries on the Lakehouses.
  • I want to use DirectLake for Power BI reports to take advantage of frequency data ingestion and transformation, and improve the actionability of my reports.
  • My data is sensitive, and users, regardless of whether they consume reports or develop their own, need to be restricted by Row Level Security to only see some of the data.

Read on for eight different approaches to the problem and Jon’s thoughts on each approach.

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Dynamic Retrieval of Microsoft Fabric Item IDs

Published 2025-02-21 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Andrew takes a peek:

When building dynamic pipelines and other artifacts in Microsoft Fabric we are currently forced to reference everything using the underlying item IDs, rather than the more useful names (display names).

In the UI, setting a item value is fine when selecting items from the respective drop down lists. But they will of course be static and can’t be changed at runtime. However, as soon as an expression is required (which in the real world, always is) those UI labels change to be the ID values. AKA the item GUIDs in the context of the workspace and wider solution.

Paul has an answer, though it’s not pretty.

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Deleting All Items from a Microsoft Fabric Workspace

Published 2025-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar has a script:

A handy function to delete all Fabric items in a workspace. Run this in a Python notebook in the workspace you want to delete items from. Everything, except that notebook, will be deleted. You need to have contributor+ role in the workspace. Delete the last remaining notebook manually.

Read on for the script. This one’s pretty straightforward, so there isn’t a lot in the way of additional commentary.

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Default Domain Settings in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven continues a series on governance in Microsoft Fabric:

A short introduction to Domains: they are essentially a way of managing and structuring your data across the organization. You can logically group together data in workspaces. A logical grouping can be business units, areas, fields, solutions or actually whatever works for you. It shouldn’t be something a Fabric Admin decides on his own. Ideally business and / or enterprise architects with the data owners (if any) should implement the design of domains, subdomains and owners. People from you Center of Excellence (again: if available..) would be a good fit to include in this discussion.

In case you need some help or guidance on how to set up your domains, there’s a nice article that can help you get started: Best practices for planning and creating domains.

Click through to learn more about domains and default domain settings.

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Saving Money in Microsoft Fabric by Automatic Pause and Resume

Published 2025-02-20 by Kevin Feasel

Soheil Bakhshi saves us some cash:

If you work in data and analytics, particularly within the Microsoft Data Platform, you have likely heard of Microsoft Fabric and its many capabilities. However, one of the biggest challenges organisations face is managing costs effectively.

In previous blogs and videos, I have covered how to optimise Microsoft Fabric capacity costs by automating the pause and resume process using Logic Apps. This approach ensures that your Fabric capacity runs only when needed, reducing unnecessary expenses. But how much can this method actually save? In this post, I share the real cost-saving results after applying this automation over the past few months.

Click through for some information on how much Soheil saved over a six-month period.

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Reading Delta Table Metadata in Power Query

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gives us the scoop:

There’s a new M function rolling out now that allows you to read metadata from Delta tables (at the time of writing it’s available in Dataflows Gen2 and will be available soon in Desktop). It builds on the DeltaLake.Table M function that allows you to read data from Delta tables and is similar to the Parquet.Metadata function that was released last year. 

Click through for an example of how to use it against a Delta table in OneLake.

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Using a Naming Convention for Microsoft Fabric Items

Published 2025-02-19 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld asks, what’s in a name?

In Fabric, you can have many different items in your Workspace. So many, that you easily get lost! Luckily there are tools at hand like Taskflows and Workspace folders. But still, it can be challenging to easily find all your items that ingest data, or find all items that are used for inbetween layers to transform data.

In this blog, I will tell you more about my personal best practice for naming convention of Fabric items that helps me to structure everything in my workspace.

This kind of thing typically doesn’t matter much when you only have a dozen or so items in your workspace. But as that number increases and different teams are working on different sets of items, it gets harder to figure out what’s going on without a proper naming convention.

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