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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Updates to OneLake Security

Published 2025-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Merrill announces some upcoming changes:

This evolution of OneLake security is still in development. Over the next few months, we will be expanding OneLake security’s integration across the platform, adding even more robust capabilities, and boosting performance. Customers wishing to get an early look at these capabilities and provide feedback before the broad public preview, can sign up for the early access preview. Once we’ve enabled your workspaces, these new features will show up as new capabilities within OneLake data access roles.

Click through to see what’s on the list. The original promise of a single security model covering all data in Microsoft Fabric is still quite a ways away, though this is a step in the right direction.

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Microsoft Fabric March 2025 Updates

Published 2025-04-01 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick LeBlanc puts together a big list:

Welcome to the March Feature Summary!

From the innovative Variable library (Preview) to the powerful Service Principal support in the CI/CD features, there’s a lot to explore. Dive in and discover how the new Partner Workloads in Fabric bring cutting-edge capabilities to your workspace. Plus, enhanced OneLake security ensures your data is protected. And don’t miss out on the expanded regional availability for Eventstream’s managed private endpoints, making it easier for organizations worldwide to build secure, scalable streaming solutions.

With FabCon kicking off today, the announcements are rolling in! Get ready to explore these features and more in the March 2025 updates for Fabric!

FabCon triggered a large number of big announcements, and considering that the outline takes up about a page and a half, there’s a lot to dig into here.

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Backup Storage Billing for Fabric SQL Databases

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Amar Digamber Patil makes an announcement:

While compute and data storage are already included in the Fabric capacity-based billing model, after April 1, 2025, backup storage will also be billed. However, customers will only be charged backup storage that exceeds the allocated database size.

Click through to see what’s changing and how to get ahead of this. I’m not sure there are any ways to reduce that backup price, short of managing the data in your database and not having enormous amounts of transaction log activity.

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Finding Microsoft Fabric Administrative Documentation

Published 2025-03-31 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven digs through the docs:

Earlier I wrote about the default domain settings, changes to the default tenant setting value for SQL database and I also covered the (rights of the) Fabric Adminsitrator role. Today I want to talk about a more meta-topic: existing documentation on Microsoft Learn, and of course specifically for Admins.

It turns out that there’s a central link for this documentation within Microsoft Learn. Nicky also includes call to action to fix simple documentation issues (such as typos) that you find.

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Querying a Microsoft Fabric SQL Endpoint from a Notebook

Published 2025-03-27 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres wants to hit a SQL endpoint:

Let’s analyse why we would like to query an SQL Endpoint. Once we understand why, we can dig into how to make a query to a SQL Endpoint.

We use notebooks to connect directly to lakehouse. Except by the T-SQL notebook, the notebooks have a default lakehouse and work directly with it from spark. However, accessing other data object may be more complex

Specifically, this is a Spark notebook in Microsoft Fabric running Scala rather than a pure Python notebook, and is hitting the data warehouse SQL endpoint.

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Fabric Espresso Episodes on Data Warehousing and Storage

Published 2025-03-26 by Kevin Feasel

Estera Kot shares some links:

For the past 1.5 years, the Microsoft Fabric Product Group Product Managers have been publishing a YouTube series featuring deep dives into Microsoft Fabric’s features. These episodes cover both technical functionalities and real-world scenarios, providing insights into the product roadmap and the people driving innovation. With over 80+ episodes, the series serves as a valuable resource for anyone looking to understand and optimize their use of Microsoft Fabric.

Click through for a link to the full series, as well as 22 separate episodes covering warehousing and data storage topics.

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Speeding up Dataflow Validation and Publish Times

Published 2025-03-24 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb doesn’t want to wait:

If you’re working with slow data sources in Power BI/Fabric dataflows then you’re probably aware that validation (for Gen1 dataflows) or publishing (for Gen2 dataflows) them can sometimes take a long time. If you’re working with very slow data sources then you may run into the 10 minute timeout on validation/publishing that is documented here. For a Gen1 dataflow you’ll see the following error message if you try to save your dataflow and validation takes more than 10 minutes:

Click through for that common error message, as well as some tips to avoid this issue. There was also an interesting approach in the comments section that circumvented the problem as well.

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Virtualizing Hadoop Data into OneLake via Apache Ozone

Published 2025-03-21 by Kevin Feasel

James Morantus hits us with a blast from the past:

Microsoft Fabric OneLake shortcuts facilitate the virtualization of data from various cloud object stores and on-premises environments. For on-premises sources like Cloudera/Apache Ozone, the OneLake S3 Compatible Shortcut can be utilized to connect to these data sources. With OneLake Shortcuts, users can create a virtual reference to their Cloudera cluster data without moving or duplicating the data. To learn more about Fabric OneLake shortcuts, reference this blog OneLake with shortcuts.

If this was a decade ago, I’d be a lot more excited. But it is kind of wild how quickly the data landscape changed, with the adoption of Spark over classic Hadoop; cloud-based data lakes over HDFS; and more focused dataset sizes over “give me everything.”

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Improving the Microsoft Fabric Copy Job

Published 2025-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Krishnakumar Rukmangathan makes a copy:

Copy Job has been a go-to tool for simplified data ingestion in Microsoft Fabric, offering a seamless data movement experience from any source to any destination. Whether you need batch or incremental copying, it provides the flexibility to meet diverse data needs while maintaining a simple and intuitive workflow.

We continuously refine Copy Job based on customer feedback, enhancing both functionality and user experience. In this update, we’re introducing three key UX improvements designed to streamline your workflow and boost efficiency.

Read on for those three improvements.

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Foreign Key Relationships in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouses

Published 2025-03-19 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Westover looks at key constraints:

In late 2024, I noticed a comment on the Microsoft Learn site stating that foreign keys could improve query performance on tables in a Fabric warehouse. That claim immediately caught my attention. I wanted to answer a simple question: Do relationships help, hurt, or have no effect when added to tables in a Fabric warehouse?

Let’s get more specific—do foreign keys improve query performance when reading data (not loading)? In other words, do they make queries run faster?

Sadly, the answer is not as promising as with SQL Server. But this also makes sense considering the distributed nature of Fabric data warehouses.

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