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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Creating a Variable Library in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-01-07 by Kevin Feasel

Laura Graham-Brown opens a library:

This post to help you get started creating a variable library. When multiple dataflows, notebooks and pipelines are using the same details to perform tasks it helps if those values are stored in one place. When you move to use deployment pipelines and those values change from your development workspace to your test workspace to your prod, it helps if that is easy. The solution in Microsoft Fabric is a Variable Library to store those common values.

Click through for step-by-step instructions on the process.

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An Overview of Fabric Security Insights

Published 2026-01-07 by Kevin Feasel

Yael Biss lays out some changes:

We want to update on a strategic evolution in how you can access and utilize security insights within Microsoft Fabric! The powerful reports you’ve relied on in the Microsoft Purview Hub are officially transitioning and being significantly enhanced within the new Admin Report in the Govern tab of the OneLake Catalog, as was announced at Ignite in November and explained in the Govern in OneLake Catalog for Fabric admins (Preview) blog post.

This isn’t just a relocation; it’s a consolidation and elevation of your most critical governance data. This move is a direct response to your feedback and a key step in providing a more unified, intuitive, and action-oriented governance experience right where your data lives.

There’s a bit too much marketing hype in the blog post for me not to roll my eyes a bit, but the security insights themselves are useful.

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An Overview of SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-01-06 by Kevin Feasel

Rebecca Lewis shares some thoughts:

Now let’s look at an actual transactional database running inside Fabric.

SQL database in Microsoft Fabric became generally available at Ignite in November 2025. This isn’t a data warehouse. It’s not a lakehouse with a SQL endpoint. It’s a real OLTP database — based on the same engine as Azure SQL Database — designed for operational workloads, running as a fully managed SaaS service inside your Fabric capacity.

Read on for some thoughts around capabilities and current limitations.

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Top Microsoft Fabric Features from 2025

Published 2025-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic builds an end of year list:

Microsoft Fabric just turned two a couple of weeks ago (at Ignite in November, to be more precise). As the product is still very much a “work in progress”, we have overseen literally hundreds of new features in the last 365 days. Obviously, not all of them are equally important – some were simply trying to fix the obvious issues in the existing workloads, or trying to catch up either with competitors or with some functionalities we had in the older Microsoft data platform solutions, whereas the others were targeting super niche use cases.

Therefore, in this article, I’ll try to distill what I consider the biggest announcements around Microsoft Fabric in 2025.

Read on for three caveats, followed by the list and quite a few additional nominees.

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A Look at Fabric IQ

Published 2025-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev shares some thoughts on Fabric IQ:

At Ignite in November, 2025, Microsoft introduced Fabric IQ. I noted to go beyond the marketing hype and check if Fabric IQ makes any sense. The next thing I know, around the holidays I’m talking to an enterprise strategy manager from an airline company and McKinsey consultant about ontologies.

Ontology – A branch of philosophy, ontology is the study of being that investigates the nature of existence, the features all entities have in common, and how they are divided into basic categories of being. In computer science and AI, ontology refers to a set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them.

So, what better way to spend the holidays than to play with new shaky software?

Read on for Teo’s standard format of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

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Thoughts on Power BI Pro/PPU to Fabric

Published 2025-12-29 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev shares some advice:

Performance is difficult to translate because Power BI Pro/PPU run in a shared capacity, meaning compute resources (v‑cores) are pooled across many tenants and dynamically allocated, whereas Fabric capacities are dedicated, meaning that Microsoft grants specific resources expressed as number of cores and memory. Therefore, Fabric performance is predicable while Pro/PPU might not be, although I’m yet to hear from client complaining about unpredictable performance.

Read on for some high-level thoughts on performance and cost.

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Accessing Microsoft Graph API via Fabric Data Factory

Published 2025-12-22 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Hernandez makes a connection:

This article is an updated version of my 2022 post on using Synapse pipelines to retrieve security groups and their members through the Microsoft Graph API. Some customers recently asked for a Microsoft Fabric–based approach, and I also noticed that many developers are still defaulting to Python clients to interact with Graph. While Python works perfectly fine, this walkthrough demonstrates how you can accomplish the same using a parameterized Copy Data activity inside a Fabric Data Factory pipeline.

Read on to see how.

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Connecting Microsoft Fabric to Azure DevOps via Service Principal

Published 2025-12-22 by Kevin Feasel

Yaron Pri Gal doesn’t need no steenkin’ passwords:

Following Azure DevOps Service Principal & Cross Tenant Support (Generally Available) announcement for service principal and cross-tenant support – Microsoft Fabric Git Integration with Azure DevOps (ADO), this blog post serves as a guide to connecting Fabric workspaces to Azure DevOps repositories using service principal.

Fabric Git Integration is the foundation for organizations implementing fully automated CI/CD pipelines, enabling seamless movement of assets across Development, Test, and Production environments.

Currently, Fabric Git Integration supports two major Git providers: Azure DevOps and GitHub. This blog post addresses the new service principal capability for Azure DevOps.

Click through for more info and a link to Microsoft Learn that contains the instructions.

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DATE_BUCKET() Now GA in Fabric Data Warehouse

Published 2025-12-19 by Kevin Feasel

Jovan Popovic makes an announcement:

We have introduced a new DATE_BUCKET() function in Fabric Data Warehouse SQL language that makes reporting and analytics even easier.

In this blog post, you’ll discover how it simplifies time-based reporting and makes grouping dates effortless.

My experience is that DATE_BUCKET() takes a bit of effort getting used to, as it is not an intuitive function. That said, it can be really powerful for dealing with time series data. It is also available in SQL Server, as of SQL Server 2022.

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