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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Creating an Azure DevOps Deployment

Published 2026-10-20 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens deploys some Microsoft Fabric assets:

Let me generalise first: you can essentially choose two options to promote your hand-crafted and superior code compared to anyone else from development to production. The first way is to use the Fabric deployment pipelines. These are essentially copy actions that move the development state to production. Option two is to use either GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps pipelines.

The main issue I’ve seen with the Fabric deployment pipelines is that the deployed code still references the development environment. This results in your notebook running in production and happily writing the results in the development lakehouse. To mitigate this, you can add actions to the Fabric pipeline, check out the newly announced Fabric deployment plans, or remember to update all references.

Click through for a high-level depiction of the process.

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Assessing an Organizational Team’s Fabric Maturity

Published 2026-10-15 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley shares a tip:

Back in Oct 2024, I posted this article on what we were learning after a year of real-world Fabric projects, and one line from it still holds up: “Organizations come in all shapes and sizes, with various needs and different appetites for simplicity, complexity and sophistication. I’ve always been a bit shy about asking my consulting clients how ‘mature’ their business or IT teams are, but this is honestly the most accurate term.”

Maturity isn’t about company size — it’s how nimbly you can move and how much rigor your culture actually needs and wants. Overshoot it and you get process for its own sake; undershoot it and good ideas run without guardrails. The real question is whether your culture lets you move too fast, too slow, or efficiently — and that’s the lens for the assessment below.

Read on for Paul’s thoughts.

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Improvements in the Microsoft Fabric Capacity Metrics App

Published 2026-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Reitse Eskens is pleased:

In case you missed it, Microsoft released a new version of the Metrics App. We all know the current one, and we have opinions on it. But it’s all we’ve got from Microsoft, so we made do.

But now, there’s a new one. Or, well, a new one. When you install a new version, you get a second option!

Click through to see this new app, currently in preview. I wonder if it still requires the same level of permissions to see the contents. I recall that being a sticking point for capacity optimization in Fabric, especially when you bring in consultants who can understand the app but aren’t allowed to see it because of the necessary permissions.

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Running SSIS Packages in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck performs some ETL:

We have a large on-premises ETL solution built with Integration Services (SSIS). We are building a new data platform in the cloud using Microsoft Fabric. While we are building this, we would like to migrate the existing SSIS solution to the cloud so we can decommission our old servers. Is there an option to run SSIS packages in Fabric?

Click through for the answer, which is a solid “maybe, just so long as it fits this exact pattern.” But as Koen explains, some of the restrictions will hopefully go away as the feature matures.

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Architecting a Reporting Solution on a Fabric F2

Published 2026-10-13 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers builds it on the cheap:

In this blog post, I want to show you how I architected a customer reporting solution using a single Microsoft Fabric F2 capacity and Power BI Embedded through Entelexos.

The two core subscriptions total USD $362 per month. That covers the reserved Fabric capacity and the Entelexos Basic subscription.

The reason I wanted to share this is to show that it is possible to engineer a cost-effective solution for smaller customers.

Click through to see how.

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Choosing a Fabric Rollout Strategy

Published 2026-10-09 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley makes a recommendation:

Pilot versus enterprise-wide is the wrong debate. The real question is which one your organization is actually ready for.

Start narrow, then earn scale.

Microsoft’s capacity planning guidance recommends beginning with a proof-of-concept phase on a free 60-day trial capacity, a single use case, a small user group, and an isolated workspace so nothing touches production. You’re testing the concept, not committing the whole company. That isolation matters as much as the scope — keeping the proof-of-concept out of production workspaces means a bad assumption costs you a workspace, not a week of executive reporting.

Read on for a few more tips along these lines.

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Working with Deployment Plans in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2026-10-07 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant digs into a new announcement:

To clarify, deployment plans are a new type of Microsoft Fabric item that lets you control deployment order and automate actions as part of the deployment. For example, you can define a plan that first creates a Lakehouse and then runs a notebook afterwards to insert it with data.

Deployment plans are not another deployment option. Instead, they enrich the deployment options that are already available. At this moment in time they work with Git integration, Deployment Pipelines and supported REST APIs.

Read on to learn more about these.

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A Recap of FabCon Barcelona

Published 2026-10-07 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Meidinger covers the news:

There were many announcements last week at FabCon Barcelona. Overall, there was one clear theme: semantic models are as important as ever and have more use cases than ever before.

  • You can do more with Fabric Apps soon. They will be included with Pro and PPU licenses, along with Fabric SQL DBs (up to 1 GB).
  • Microsoft has officially committed to the Apache Ossie format as a vendor-neutral way of defining semantic models. A very early two-way converter is up on GitHub.
  • Semantic meaning will be able to live in your Fabric lakehouse with semantic views. This will make it easier to define business meaning closer to the data.
  • Fabric ontologies can now use DAX measures as explicit metrics and can be created from multiple semantic models.

Additionally, Microsoft has shown a clear and continued commitment to supporting AI agents for Power BI report development, Fabric App development, and semantic modeling. Expect this to continue into the future.

Click through for a dive into some of these topics.

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Major Announcements from FabCon Europe 2026

Published 2026-10-06 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria has a list:

Policies were much needed. Until now, many Fabric capabilities were controlled by tenant switches that enable a feature for everyone or restrict it for everyone. Nothing was this fine-grained, which created blind spots and admin headaches. Fabric Policies let admins define who can perform an action, what the rule covers, and where it applies. If no rule matches, the action is denied.

The first three policy types are:

  • Item creation (capacity scope): controls who can create specific item types in workspaces on a capacity.
  • Edit workspace settings (tenant scope): controls who can change security-sensitive workspace settings, such as network security and customer-managed keys.
  • External data sharing (tenant scope): controls who can share data externally, from which workspaces, for which sensitivity labels, and to which recipient domains.

Policies are stored in Policy Set items and managed in the Policies Center in the OneLake catalog. They support public APIs and Git integration, and policy changes are recorded in the Microsoft 365 audit log.

Click through for all ten.

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