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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Automating V-Order Optimization in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Miles Cole writes a script:

I’ve previously blogged in detail about V-Order optimization. In this post, I want to revisit the topic and demonstrate how V-Order can be strategically enabled in a programmatic fashion.

Since V-Order provides the most benefit and consistent improvement for Direct Lake Semantic Models, why not leverage platform metadata to enable it automatically—but only for Delta tables used by these models?

This will be a short blog—let’s get straight to the concept, the source code, and then move on to more strategic use of this feature.

Click through for the process and an explanation of what’s happening in the accompanying Gist.

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Running a Microsoft Fabric Notebook from ADO via Service Principal

Published 2025-02-03 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant needs a service principal to help:

In this post I want to share one way that you can authenticate as a service principal to run a Microsoft Fabric notebook from Azure DevOps.

Some of you may recall that I previously covered how to run a Microsoft Fabric notebook from Azure DevOps.

I decided to published a newer version of the aforementioned post to amplify the fact that the REST API that runs a notebook on demand now supports service principals.

Service principals are the way to go for this, so long as you’re having one Azure-based service communicate with another Azure-based service. No passwords, no API keys, nothing you need to remember or change every 90 days.

The problem is, this works beautifully for assets inside of Azure, but not so much outside of Azure. But that’s a story for a different day.

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Data Retention for Data in the Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse

Published 2025-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Kenneth Omorodion clears out some data:

More than before, organizations now aim for a well-defined approach to manage their data storage effectively. Some reasons for this include operational efficiency, cost management, regulatory compliance, and strategic decision-making. In this article, I will describe an approach on data retention management​ for Lakehouse files to manage data storage when the data exists as files in the Fabric Lakehouse.

There’s nothing built in but Kenneth makes it easy.

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Microsoft Fabric Item Ownership Takeover

Published 2025-01-29 by Kevin Feasel

Sakshi Jain has an announcement:

Today, when an item owner leaves the company, their credentials expire, or they lose access, many Fabric items cease to function. For example, Lakehouses and their SQL Endpoints become inoperative, Pipelines fail to execute due to user access errors. In these situations, enabling another user to assume ownership would ensure business continuity.

We are pleased to announce that Fabric users with the right permissions can now take ownership of Fabric items.

This is a big deal. for the same reason that we don’t want individual users to own databases in SQL Server, having individual users own objects in Fabric lakehouses and endpoints was always a risky play. At least now, there’s a way to handle when that person leaves the company.

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Automatically Refreshing a Power BI Semantic Model after Dataflow Loads

Published 2025-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad refreshes a model:

Although this seems to be a simple thing to do, it is not a function that you can turn on or off. If you have a Dataflow that does the ETL and transforms and prepares the data, then to get the most up-to-date data into the report, you will need to refresh the Power BI semantic model after that, only upon successful refresh of both dataflow and semantic model is when you will have the up-to-date data into the report. Fortunately, in Fabric, this is a straightforward setup. In this article and video, I’ll explain how this is possible.

Click through for the video and the blog post. Granted, this feature is in preview, but using it is pretty straightforward.

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Microsoft Fabric for the SMB

Published 2025-01-27 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Meidinger looks out for the smaller fish in the pond:

If you are a small (or even medium) business, you may be wondering “What is Fabric and do we even need it?” If you are primarily on Power BI Pro licenses today, you may not find a compelling reason to switch to Fabric today, but the value add should improve over time as new features are added on the Fabric side and some features get deprecated on the Power BI side.

Read on for plenty of advice, metaphors, and even a few warnings.

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Handling Excel Files in OneLake via File Explorer

Published 2025-01-22 by Kevin Feasel

Kristyna Ferris needs to get a file:

Hey data friends! This blog is to discuss an edge case I’ve run into in Microsoft Fabric. I won’t go into all the context, but the goal was to have an Excel file accessible to Microsoft Fabric without OneDrive, SharePoint, nor an on-premises data gateway. We also didn’t want a csv because we wanted to have multiple tabs and structured tables with formulas which won’t save properly in csv files.

So how did we do it? OneLake!

Read on to learn how.

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Thoughts on Separating Power BI and Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-01-17 by Kevin Feasel

Eugene Meidinger calls out my favorite law of headlines:

If you know Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, then you know the answer is no. But let’s get into it anyway.

Recently there was LinkedIn post that made a bunch of great and valid points but ended on an odd one.

Number one change would be removing Power BI from Fabric completely and doubling down on making it even easier for the average business user, as I have previously covered in some posts.

It’s hard for me to take this as a serious proposal instead of wishful thinking, but I think the author is being serious, so let’s treat it as such.

Read on for a bit of history and why Eugene thinks this is a very bad idea.

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