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Category: Microsoft Fabric

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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Iceberg Data Support in OneLake

Published 2025-03-18 by Kevin Feasel

Matthew Hicks isn’t replicating data anymore:

Microsoft OneLake is the single, unified, logical data lake that allows your entire organization to store, manage, and analyze data in one place. It provides seamless integration with various data sources and engines, making it easier to derive insights and drive innovation.

At the most recent Microsoft Build conference, we announced the integration effort between Snowflake and OneLake, which aims to allow users of both Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric to work on the same Iceberg data in OneLake, with no data duplication/movement needed. More recently, we released the preview of OneLake’s Iceberg table format support, which included the ability for Snowflake to write Iceberg tables directly to OneLake.

Click through for more information about the current status of this feature, as well as what’s coming soon.

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Spatial Queries in Fabric Data Warehouse

Published 2025-03-14 by Kevin Feasel

Jovan Popvic reads a map:

Spatial data has become increasingly important in various fields, from urban planning and environmental monitoring to transportation and logistics. Fabric Data Warehouse offers spatial functionalities that enable you to query and analyze spatial data efficiently.

In this blog post, we will delve into the spatial capabilities in the Fabric Data Warehouse and demonstrate how to use the spatial functions in your queries.

This looks a bit like the way we perform spatial operations in SQL Server. Jovan shows off some examples of functionality, so check that out.

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SQL Database Default Checkbox in Microsoft Fabric Delayed

Published 2025-03-13 by Kevin Feasel

Amar Digamber Patil makes an announcement:

In our ongoing effort to enhance the visibility, accessibility, and efficiency of SQL database in Fabric, we are making a change that ensures organizations can make an informed decision before default enablement takes effect. We have changed the timeline for when SQL database will be enabled by default.

Initially, we planned to roll out the checkbox notification on February 8, 2025, and enable SQL Database in Fabric by default on March 8, 2025. However, based on the need for more flexibility, we have adjusted the timeline:

Click through for the new timeline. You can, of course, enable it on your own today if you are a Microsoft Fabric administrator with rights to change these settings.

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Vacuuming Delta Tables in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-03-13 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Omorodion explains why you sometimes need to bust out the VACUUM:

Efficient data management in Microsoft Fabric is a necessity in maintaining large-scale partitioned Delta tables. In dynamic datasets with frequently generated new files, the need to ensure the removal of stale files becomes very important to prevent storage bloating. In settings with partitioned tables, where data is in a hierarchical structure (e.g., by year, month, day), this can be particularly challenging, and files must be cleaned without disrupting active data. Learn how the VACUUM operation can help optimize delta tables.

Read on to learn more.

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Deploying Assets via Azure DevOps and fabric-cicd into Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-03-12 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant pushes some code:

In this post I want to show how you can operationalize fabric-cicd to work with Microsoft Fabric and Azure DevOps. Which I exclusively revealed at Power BI Gebruikersdag over the weekend.

Just so that everybody is aware, fabric-cicd is a Python library that allows you to perform CI/CD of various Microsoft Fabric items into Microsoft Fabric workspaces. At this moment in time there is a limited number of supported item types. However, that list is increasing.

Click through to see what Kevin did and how it worked out.

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Writing Data into a Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse via Notebook

Published 2025-03-12 by Kevin Feasel

Stepan Resl writes some code:

Since Lakehouse is one of the key items within Microsoft Fabric, it is important to know how to write data into it in various formats and using different tools. One of the most common tools is notebooks, as they provide great flexibility and speed for development and testing with graphical outputs. In this article, I want to focus primarily on the following types of notebooks:

  • PySpark
  • Python

Click through to see how it works in both notebook types.

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Retrieving Microsoft Fabric Items using a Python-Only Notebook

Published 2025-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers doesn’t need Spark for this:

This blog below explains how to use a Python only notebook to get all the Fabric items using the Fabric REST API.

NOTE: At the time of this blog post Feb 2025, Dataflow Gen2 is not included in the Fabric items, I am sure it will be there in the future.

NOTE II: This only gets the Fabric Items, which does not include the Power BI Items.

Despite the notes, Gilbert leads off with the main reason why you might want to use this: it takes up approximately 5% of the capacity units that a Spark-based notebook does to perform the same operation.

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Refreshing Power BI Semantic Model Hidden Tables via Fabric Data Pipelines

Published 2025-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb digs into the dark underbelly of a semantic model:

Following on from my recent post about refreshing semantic models with Fabric Data Pipelines and the semantic model refresh activity, a few people asked me how to refresh hidden tables because they are not displayed in the Pipeline configuration UI. I got the answer from my colleague Alex Powers (aka reddit celebrity u/itsnotaboutthecell) who kindly allowed me to blog about it.

Click through for the demonstration.

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ETL Orchestration and Air Traffic Control

Published 2025-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Jens Vestergaard extends a metaphor:

We have been working getting an enterprise grade event driven orchestration of our ETL system to operate like an airport control tower, managing a fleet of flights (data processes) as they progress through various stages of take-off, transit, and landing. All of this, because Microsoft Fabric has a core-based limit to the number of Notebook executions that a capacity can execute and have queued up in line for execution when invoking them using the REST API. Read the details here: limits (you know, it’s funny that there is no stated limits for Azure Service Bus Queues on number of messages in queue, but there is for Microsoft Fabric, which uses a Service Bus queue underneath…)

That limitation is a bit annoying, but read on to see how Jens uses this metaphor to explain the various parts of an ETL orchestration engine.

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