Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Microsoft Fabric

PARSE_SYNTAX_ERROR in Microsoft Fabric Notebooks

Published 2025-05-14 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt runs into an error:

As mentioned earlier, I have been playing around with Microsoft Fabric intensively in the past few months. During this period, I ran into a specific issue with one of my notebooks. What happened? Well, I was starting on a new notebook in the evening and life happened… So I stopped playing around to do something else.

A few days later, I wanted to continue my work and remembered that I was required to change something in my data load from a csv file.

Read on for the cause of this error. It’s something that can affect anyone at any time. Even you. Well, probably not you, but the person next to you? Yeah, even that person.

Leave a Comment

Billing and Microsoft Fabric Preview Features

Published 2025-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven explains that TANSTAAFL:

First of all, when using Preview features in Fabric, you should be aware of the small print.

Next, we all know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, right?

Because: preview does not mean free! Let me explain.

Two of those preview features – SQL Database and Workspace Monitoring – have recently moved to a charging model as Fabric develops further. It’s essential to understand these adjustments if you want to maximize your resources, govern your capacity and efficiently control expenses.

Read on to learn more. It’s very uncommon for preview features in Azure to come with a bill, so make sure you don’t get surprised by these.

Leave a Comment

Comparing Microsoft Fabric Engines

Published 2025-05-13 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic performs a comparison:

Before we proceed, an important disclaimer: the guidance I’m providing here is based on both my experience with implementing Microsoft Fabric in real-world scenarios, and the recommended practices provided by Microsoft. 

Please keep in mind that the guidance relies on general recommended practices (I intentionally avoid using the phrase best practices, because the best is very hard to determine and agree on). The word general means that the practice I recommend should be used in most of the respective scenarios, but there will always be edge cases when the recommended practice is simply not the best solution. Therefore, you should always evaluate whether the general recommended practice makes sense in your specific use case.

Click through for a comparison between three engines: the lakehouse, the warehouse, and the eventhouse. It would really simplify things if the lakehouse and warehouse combined into one coherent whole.

Leave a Comment

Shortcut Caching in Microsoft Fabric now GA

Published 2025-05-12 by Kevin Feasel

Trevor Olson announces a feature has become generally available:

Shortcuts in OneLake allow you to quickly and easily source data from external cloud providers and use it across all Fabric workloads such as Power BI reports, SQL, Spark and Kusto.  However, each time these workloads read data from cross-cloud sources, the source provider (AWS, GCP) charges additional egress fees on the data. Thankfully, shortcut caching allows the data to only be sourced once and then used across all Fabric workloads without additional egress fees.

This is useful for data that hardly ever changes, and Trevor also shows you who can control the cache length and reset the cache. In addition, the on-premises gateway for shortcuts is now generally available, so you can take shortcuts of certain on-prem file systems.

Leave a Comment

Checking Key Vault Access in Microsoft Fabric Spark Notebooks

Published 2025-05-09 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld has clearance:

Working with sensitive data in Microsoft Fabric requires careful handling of secrets, especially when collaborating externally. In a recent customer engagement, I needed to validate access to Azure Key Vault from within a Fabric Notebook, without ever exposing the actual secret values. With only read access granted and no need to manage or update secrets, I focused on confirming that the connection was working as expected.

In this blog, I’ll walk you through the approach, including the setup, code snippets, and logic behind this quick but crucial verification step.

Click through for the full story.

Leave a Comment

Mirroring vs Shortcuts in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-05-08 by Kevin Feasel

Nikola Ilic compares and contrasts:

A few days ago, I shared a short LinkedIn post in which I condensed key differences and use cases for both mirroring and shortcuts in Microsoft Fabric. Since the post sparked some nice conversation and opened a few additional question, I decided to cover the same topic here, so that it doesn’t get lost in LinkedIn’s “jungle”:)

But, before we move to the final showdown, let’s take one step back and explain what mirroring and shortcuts are.

Click through for the overview and explanation of how the two differ, as well as where each fits.

Comments closed

Organizing a Microsoft Fabric Data Platform with Domains

Published 2025-05-07 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge does a bit of organization:

A topic which seems more relevant than ever, is the question of how to organize the contents of your Microsoft Fabric Platform.

Through the contents of a few blogs, I will give you an overview of things to consider, as well as suggestions that you can choose from when designing your platform.

This first week, we’ll take a look at Domains in Microsoft Fabric.

Read on to understand why domains can be valuable and a solid way to structure them.

Comments closed

Writing to Microsoft FabricDelta Tables in Python via DuckDB

Published 2025-05-07 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers does a bit of writing:

When I was exploring how to easily write to Delta Tables with a Python notebook, it took me a considerable amount of time to find out how to do this.

This is my learnings below, and from my point of view it makes it easy to write to a Lakehouse table, like what is done with a PySpark notebook.

Click through for one very important note, as well as the process.

Comments closed

Task Flows now GA in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-05-06 by Kevin Feasel

Dan Liu makes an announcement:

Task flows feature is now generally available! Task flows streamline the design of your data solutions and ensure consistency between design and development efforts. It also allows you to navigate items and manage your workspace more easily, even as it becomes more complex over time.

Read on to see what’s available to us now.

Comments closed

Authenticate to Fabric Data Connections via Key Vault Secrets

Published 2025-05-05 by Kevin Feasel

Aditya Jain announces a preview:

Azure Key Vault support in Fabric Data connections is now in preview! With this capability, we are introducing a new concept called ‘Azure Key Vault references’ in Microsoft Fabric, using which, users can reuse their existing Azure key vault secrets for authentication to data source connections instead of copy-pasting passwords, slashing credential-management effort and audit risk.

Click through to see what works so far and the current limitations.

Comments closed