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Category: Microsoft Fabric

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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A Primer on Microsoft Fabric Deployment Pipelines

Published 2026-03-03 by Kevin Feasel

Hamish Watson asks a question:

In the realm of software development and content creation, the deployment pipeline serves as a crucial bridge between innovation and implementation. Whether you are fine-tuning code, testing new features, or releasing a polished product to end-users, the deployment pipeline guides your content through distinct stages, each playing a vital role in ensuring a smooth and efficient journey from development to production.

Read on for a high-level overview of deployment pipeline structure and methods.

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MicrosoftFabricMgmt Powershell Pipeline Operations

Published 2026-03-02 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell chains together some operations:

Last week I showed you how to work with workspaces — creating, updating, removing, assigning capacities. But we were doing each operation in isolation. Today I want to show you what happens when you connect those operations together using the PowerShell pipeline.

This is one of my favourite aspects of PowerShell and therefore it was imperative that Jess Pomfret B S L and I revamped the module to fully support pipeline operations. Every cmdlet that makes sense in a pipeline is built to work in one.

Click through for some examples of what this means.

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Pain Points around Direct Lake

Published 2026-02-27 by Kevin Feasel

Teo Lachev describes a pair of problems:

I’m helping an enterprise client modernize their data analytics estate. As a part of this exercise, a SSAS Multidimensional financial cube must be converted to a Power BI semantic model. The challenge is that business users ask for almost real-time BI during the forecasting period, where a change in the source forecasting system must be quickly propagated to the reporting the layer, so the users don’t sit around waiting to analyze the impact. An important part of this architecture is the Fabric Direct Lake storage to eliminate the refresh latency, but it came up with a couple of gotchas.

Click through for those two problems.

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Building Power BI Reports from the Desktop or Fabric

Published 2026-02-27 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra clears up some confusion:

If you’re a Power BI report author who’s just getting into Microsoft Fabric, you’ve probably asked the same question I hear over and over: am I supposed to stop using Power BI Desktop now?

It’s a fair question. Power BI Desktop is a Windows app that has traditionally been the place where report authors do everything: get data, transform it, model it, and build the report. Microsoft even describes that “connect, shape/transform, then load” experience as part of how Power BI Desktop works with Power Query.

Fabric changes the feel of that workflow because Power BI is now also a first-class experience in the browser inside the Fabric portal. And that browser experience isn’t just “view and share” anymore. You can edit semantic models in the service, including using Power Query for import models and building reports directly from that same environment.

Read on to see, for a brand new report, which of the two models can make the most sense.

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An Overview of the Fabric Native Execution Engine

Published 2026-02-27 by Kevin Feasel

Ankita Victor-Levi introduces a new processing model:

In today’s data landscape, as organizations scale their analytical workloads, the demand for faster, more cost-efficient computation continues to rise. Apache Spark has long been the backbone of largescale data processing with its in‑memory processing and powerful APIs, but today’s workloads demand even better performance.

Microsoft Fabric addresses this challenge with the Native Execution Engine—a vectorized, C++ powered execution layer that accelerates Spark jobs with no code changes, reduced runtime, and at no additional compute cost. This blog post will take you behind the scenes to give an overview of how the engine works and how it delivers performance gains while preserving the familiar Spark developer experience users already know and love.

Read on to learn more about its capabilities and current limitations.

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Microsoft Fabric Updates for February 2026

Published 2026-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Katie Murray puts together a list:

This month brings a wide range of enhancements across the Fabric platform—from improvements to the OneLake Catalog and developer experiences, to meaningful updates in Data Engineering, Data Factory, Real‑Time Intelligence, and more. Whether you’re building, operating, or scaling solutions in Fabric, there’s plenty here to explore. And with FabCon just weeks away, February’s updates are a great preview of what’s ahead.

Click through for a big list, though I’d expect the March list to be significantly larger.

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Workspace Operations with MicrosoftFabricMgmt

Published 2026-02-26 by Kevin Feasel

Rob Sewell continues a series:

The workspace is the fundamental unit of organisation in Microsoft Fabric. Everything lives inside a workspace — your lakehouses, warehouses, notebooks, pipelines, reports. Managing workspaces is therefore the first practical skill to build, and MicrosoftFabricMgmt makes it straightforward.

Read on for examples covering how to create, update, list, retrieve, or remove workspaces.

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Comparing Lakehouse and Warehouse Performance again

Published 2026-02-25 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers provides some more comparisons:

I learnt a lot and based on the feedback people asked for me to compare the Lakehouse vs the Warehouse with 1 billion rows.

What I also did this time was to optimize anything I could with regards to loading data into the Lakehouse or the Warehouse based on the feedback I received.

Below is a list of the changes I made

Read on for those changes and how they affected performance. That’s the tricky part about performance comparisons: unless you know how to tweak all options equally, you can end up with skewed results.

I’d also be interested in how the Eventhouse fares. I believe that, when it comes to data retrieval, the Eventhouse is the fastest option available to us.

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