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Category: Microsoft Fabric

An Overview of Fabric IQ

Published 2025-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2025-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2025-12-01 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2025-11-25 by Kevin Feasel

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

Published 2025-11-24 by Kevin Feasel

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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Power BI Projects and PBIR Format Admin Settings

Published 2025-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck notes a new default:

The Power BI Enhanced Report Format (PBIR) will soon become the default, and that’s a good thing because it significantly makes git integration easier. You can already enable it in the preview features of Power BI Desktop (also enable PBIP and TMDL to make git integration of the model itself much easier).

Read on to see the administrative setting associated with this, as well as reasons why you should keep it on.

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Eventhouse Endpoint for Fabric Data Warehouse

Published 2025-11-21 by Kevin Feasel

Tzvia Gitlin Troyna announces a new feature:

The new Eventhouse Endpoint for Fabric Data Warehouse extends this same architecture to structured data sources, allowing users to:

  • Query Fabric Data Warehouse tables in real-time using KQL.
  • Leverage schema mirroring for warehouse tables.
  • Unify analytics across Lakehouse and Fabric Data Warehouse without duplicating data.

Even if I don’t expect many data platform practitioners to use KQL and even though I’m morally opposed to the Fabric Data Warehouse (short version: Lakehouses and Warehouses in Fabric should be the same thing, not two separate things), I’d still consider this a step forward. It does provide a new integration point between two services that have been annoyingly isolated.

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Database and Fabric Ignite Roundup

Published 2025-11-20 by Kevin Feasel

Victoria Holt lays out the news:

Real-Time Analytics with Synapse Real-Time Intelligence

  • The new Synapse Real-Time Intelligence in Fabric allows streaming data from operational databases to be analyzed instantly.
  • This supports use cases like fraud detection, predictive maintenance, and personalized recommendations.

Ah, thank goodness they’re re-using the name Synapse for something that has nothing to do with Azure Synapse Analytics. Makes sense when you’re running Microsoft Service Fab–, err, App Fab–, err, Fabric.

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What’s New in OneLake

Published 2025-11-20 by Kevin Feasel

Kim Manis shares an update:

In this blog post, I’ll highlight the new zero-ETL, zero-copy sources in OneLake, deeper interoperability between OneLake and Microsoft Foundry, and new tools to help admins manage capacity, security, and governance at scale. Together, these updates further cement Fabric as the ideal data platform for your mission-critical workloads—open, integrated, secure, and built to connect every part of your data estate to the intelligence your business needs. 

Read on to see some of the latest from Ignite.

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