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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Data Extraction from Unstructured Data with Fabric AI Functions

Published 2026-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar demonstrates functionality:

Most enterprise data lives in free text – tickets, contracts, feedback, clinical notes, and more. It holds critical information but doesn’t fit into the structured tables that pipelines expect. Traditionally, extracting structure meant rule-based parsers that break with every format to change, or custom NLP models that take weeks to build. LLMs opened new possibilities, but on their own they bring inconsistent outputs, no type of enforcement, and results that vary between runs. What production workflows need is LLM intelligence with structured-output guarantees, delivered inside the data platform teams already use.

Microsoft Fabric AI Functions deliver exactly that. Functions like ai.summarize, ai.classify, ai.translate, and ai.extract let you transform and enrich unstructured data at scale with a single line of code – no model deployment or ML infrastructure needed. For the full list, see Transform and enrich data with AI functions.

Click through for an example. The tricky part of this is, because answers won’t be deterministic, you have to do a lot of testing and verification to ensure things are working reasonably well.

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Eventstream Not Sending Data to KQL Database after Resuming Fabric Capacity

Published 2026-03-11 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt troubleshoots an issue:

To continue the development of my mobile app, whose core ability is to scan barcodes of consumable articles and send them over for analytics, I’m resuming my capacity, starting to scan barcodes again, sending them to my Eventstream, and finally saving them in my KQL database.

After a couple of minutes, I wanted to validate all the scanned results in my KQL database and navigate to my scanned_barcode table.

Read on to see how Olivier diagnosed and corrected the problem.

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Logging and Error Handling with MicrosoftFabricMgmt

Published 2026-03-10 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell continues a series on the MicrosoftFabricMgmt Powershell module. First up is structured logging:

If you have ever come back to a script the next morning and thought “what on earth happened last night?”, you understand why logging matters. Write-Host and Write-Verbose are fine for interactive use, but in automation — scheduled tasks, CI/CD pipelines, long-running jobs — you need something more structured. Something you can query, filter, and persist across sessions, something that you can provide to your team or support or auditors.

MicrosoftFabricMgmt uses PSFramework for all its internal logging, and that capability is available directly to you.

Then comes retry logic and dealing with long-running operations:

REST APIs fail. Networks are unreliable. Cloud services have rate limits. If your automation script does not account for this, it will eventually break at the worst possible moment. This is not pessimism — it is production experience.

MicrosoftFabricMgmt has a lot of error handling built in, so you do not have to write it all yourself. Today I want to show you what the module handles automatically, and how to add your own handling on top for the scenarios you care about.

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Deploy Microsoft Fabric Items with fabric-cicd in Azure DevOps

Published 2026-03-10 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant announces a new Azure DevOps extension:

This post covers how you can simplify Microsoft Fabric deployments with “Deploy Microsoft Fabric items with fabric-cicd”. Which is an Azure DevOps extension that I recently published.

To manage expectations, this post shows how to start working with the extension and its associated task within the GUI-based classic release pipelines in Azure DevOps. Like in the below screenshot.

Read on to see how the extension works.

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Preview-Only Steps in Microsoft Fabric Dataflows

Published 2026-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb covers a new feature:

I have been spending a lot of time recently investigating the new performance-related features that have rolled out in Fabric Dataflows over the last few months, so expect a lot of blog posts on this subject in the near future. Probably my favourite of these features is Preview-Only steps: they make such a big difference to my quality of life as a Dataflows developer.

The basic idea (which you can read about in the very detailed docs here) is that you can add steps to a query inside a Dataflow that are only executed when you are editing the query and looking at data in the preview pane; when the Dataflow is refreshed these steps are ignored. This means you can do things like add filters, remove columns or summarise data while you’re editing the Dataflow in order to make the performance of the editor faster or debug data problems. It’s all very straightforward and works well.

First up, that feature is pretty interesting, though I could see things break if you only do your testing in the preview pane. Second, what Chris does with this is quite interesting.

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Creating Fabric Linked Service Parameters for ADO Deployment

Published 2026-03-06 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck glues together several technologies:

Quite the title, so let me set the stage first. You have an Azure Data Factory instance (or Azure Synapse Pipelines) and you have a couple of linked services that point to Fabric artifacts such as a lakehouse or a warehouse. You want to deploy your ADF instance with an Azure Devops build/release pipeline to another environment (e.g. acceptance or production) and this means the linked services need to change as well because in those environments the lakehouse or warehouse are in a different workspace (and also have different object Ids).

When you want to deploy ADF, you typically use the ARM template that ADF automatically creates when you publish (when your instance is linked with a git repo). More information about this setup can be found in the documentation. To parameterize certain properties of a linked service, you can use custom parameterization of the ARM template. Anyway, long story short, I tried to parameterize the properties of the Fabric linked service. 

Read on to see how that went, as well as what you need to do to solve this issue.

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Getting Help in MicrosoftFabricMgmt

Published 2026-03-05 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell continues a series on the Microsoft Fabric management Powershell module:

Most of this blog post is going to be more about PowerShell in general than this specific module. The MicrosoftFabricMgmt module has over 295 cmdlets, which can be overwhelming at first glance. But PowerShell’s built-in discovery tools make it easy to find what you need. Knowing how to use a command is always available in the shell itself. You can find out how to use a function, what parameters it takes, and see examples of its usage without ever leaving the command line.

I have been using PowerShell for over a decade, and I still rely heavily on Get-Command and Get-Help to explore new modules and refresh my memory on ones I haven’t used in a while. In this post, I’ll show you how to use these tools effectively to navigate the MicrosoftFabricMgmt module.

Read on to see how you can get help. At least, on that front.

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Restoring Backed-Up Items in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-03-05 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers grabs an item from backup:

In my previous blog post I had shown you how to backup your Microsoft Fabric Items: Backing Up Your Microsoft Fabric Workspace: A Notebook-Driven Approach to Disaster Recovery – FourMoo | Microsoft Fabric | Power BI

The next natural question is what happens when you want to restore one if the items that were previously backed up.

In the steps below I will show you how to do this.

Read on to see how it works and a bit of pain that you might experience.

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DevOps in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-03-04 by Kevin Feasel

Hamish Watson lays out what DevOps means in the context of Microsoft Fabric:

Microsoft Fabric (not to be confused with the more general term “fabric” in DevOps) is an integrated data and analytics platform designed for modern data-driven workloads, such as data engineering, business intelligence, and machine learning. With the introduction of Git integration in Microsoft Fabric, DevOps practices are becoming more accessible in the platform, allowing teams to implement collaborative, automated workflows that are common in DevOps environments.

Read on for some of the high-level concepts of what we do with DevOps and how they apply directly to Microsoft Fabric workspaces.

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Evaluating Power Query Programmatically in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Mihir Wagle announces a new preview capability:

Power Query has long been at the center of data preparation across Microsoft products—from Excel and Power BI to Dataflows and Fabric. We’re introducing a major evolution: the ability to execute Power Query programmatically through a public API.

This capability turns Power Query into a programmable data transformation engine that can be invoked on demand through a REST API from notebooks, pipelines, and applications. Whether you’re orchestrating data pipelines, building custom data apps, or integrating Power Query into larger workflows, this API unlocks new flexibility and automation.

Click through for an overview of what’s available.

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