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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Backing up a Microsoft Fabric Workspace

Gilbert Quevauvilliers finds a gap and fills it:

In the high-stakes world of data architecture, where downtime can cascade into real business disruptions, I’ve learned that even the most robust platforms have their blind spots. Just last month, while collaborating with a client’s Architecture team on their disaster recovery strategy, we uncovered a subtle but critical gap in Microsoft Fabric: while OneLake thoughtfully mirrors data across multiple regions by default, other workspace items—like notebooks, semantic models, and pipelines—aren’t directly accessible in a failover scenario without extra steps. For the nitty-gritty on Fabric’s built-in reliability features, check out this Microsoft Learn guide.

That’s the spark that led me down this rabbit hole, and in this post, I’ll walk you through a practical solution: a Python Notebook that automates backing up your entire Fabric workspace to OneLake and an Azure Storage Account for that extra layer of redundancy. Whether you’re prepping for the worst or just embracing the “better safe than sorry” mindset, this approach gives you portable, versioned copies you can restore quickly.

Click through for the notebook, as well as instructions on how to use it.

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Access S3 Buckets in VPCs in Fabric via Entra Integration

Premal Shah announces new functionality in preview:

When we first introduced Amazon S3 shortcut integration with Microsoft Entra ID, customers gained a powerful new way to connect S3 data to Microsoft Fabric — without storing or rotating AWS access keys. Using OpenID Connect (OIDC), Fabric authenticates directly with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), enabling secure, identity-based access to cloud storage.

However, many enterprises keep their S3 buckets locked down inside Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) or behind corporate firewalls. In these environments, Entra OIDC can authenticate identities, but it cannot provide network access — so Fabric still cannot reach the S3 endpoint. That changes today.

Read on to see what has changed, how you can enable this functionality, and current limitations.

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Exploring the Fabric Capacity Metrics App

Nicky van Vroenhoven wants to get the number:

If you find yourself checking the Metrics app and see a spike in usage you might want to analyze that. How many times did you have to click to get exactly the column you needed? Or before you were able to click any column at all?

Read on to see how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop. As well as how to deal with a visual not based in log units.

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Using the Microsoft Fabric Copy Job with Data in Dataverse

Laura Graham-Brown loads some data:

Dataverse is the data store behind parts of Dynamics and lots of Power Platform projects. So Dataverse can contain vital business data that will be needed for reporting. In this post we are going to look at one method which is using copy job with Dataverse to copy across data in Microsoft Fabric.

Click through to see how, including incremental data loads.

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An Overview of Fabric IQ

Brian Bonk talks ontologies:

If you followed along with the announcements from Microsoft Ignite, you might have stumbled upon the new Fabric IQ service.

For many people, this new service can seem a bit strange to see the point in, so in this blogpost I will try to help you understand the usage and business value of the new service.

Ontologies aren’t new—it’s mostly a metadata management exercise—but there are several companies (like Palantir) pushing this hard in their tools, and Microsoft is working that market segment. But instead of using all of this metadata management for data quality or master data management reasons, it’s for feeding into language models.

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OPENROWSET and External Tables in Fabric SQL Databases

Hugo Queiroz makes a connection:

Data Virtualization brings to Fabric SQL Database the same set of capabilities already available on Azure SQL Database, Azure SQL Managed Instance and SQL Server, customers can now use OPENROWSET and External Tables, with complete parity across SQL flavors, develop once deploy anywhere. Data Virtualization for Fabric SQL Databases directly supports Parquet and delimited text (CSV), but JSON files can also be read using functions like JSON_VALUE and OPENJSON.

This is currently in preview. Read on to see what’s in the preview.

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Orchestration Options in Microsoft Fabric

Reitse Eskens moves some data:

Well, unless you enjoy waking up every night to start your Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) process and manually running each process to do some work, it’s a smart move to automate this. Also, make sure everything always runs in the correct order. Additionally, there are situations where processes need to run in different configurations.

All these things can be done with what we call orchestration. It may sound a bit vague now, but we’ll get to the different moving parts of this, like parameterisation and pipelines.

Read on for a primer on the topic.

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Copy Job in Fabric Data Factory Pipelines now GA

Jianlei Shen makes an announcement:

Copy Job Activity allows you to run Copy jobs as native activities inside Data Factory pipelines.

Copy jobs are created and managed independently in Data Factory for quick data movement between supported sources and destinations. With Copy job Activity, that same fast, lightweight experience is now embedded within pipelines, making it easier to automate, schedule, and chain Copy jobs as part of broader data workflows.

Read on for an overview of what’s in the activity and a few links on how to get started with it.

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Data Visualization and Microsoft Fabric Notebooks

Meagan Longoria thinks about notebooks:

Lots of people have created Power BI reports, using interactive data visualizations to explore and communicate data. When Power BI was first created, it was used in situations that weren’t ideal because that was all we had as far as cloud-based tools in the Microsoft data stack. Now, in addition to interactive reports, we have paginated reports and notebooks. In this post, I’ll discuss when notebooks might be an appropriate visualization tool.

Click through for Meagan’s thoughts.

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