A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Nicky van Vroenhoven notices a change:
In case you have access to the M365 Admin Center, or more specific the M365 Message Center, you might have seen this message. I reckon not many people did.. That’s why I’m blogging about it here
I’m specifically talking about this message in the Message Center, being a major update and with admin impact:
Read on for more information about what’s changing.
Comments closedArshad Ali announces a connector:
We are pleased to announce the availability of the Fabric Spark connector for Fabric Data Warehouse (DW) in the Fabric Spark runtime. This connector enables Spark developers and data scientists to access and work with data from Fabric DW and the SQL analytics endpoint of the lakehouse, either within the same workspace or across different workspaces, using a simplified Spark API. The connector will be included as a default library within the Fabric Runtime, eliminating the need for separate installation.
Click through to check out its capabilities. This is a tiny step toward where I think Microsoft Fabric should go: any tool accessing the same data, eliminating separate lakehouses vs warehouses and having to remember that you can’t use this syntax in this scenario unless you connect to it this way and sacrifice one live chicken.
Comments closedKevin Chant tries a Python package:
In this post I want to cover my initial tests of fabric-cicd. In order to provide some tips for those looking to work with this new offering.
Just so that everybody is aware, fabric-cicd is a Python library that allows you to perform CI/CD of various Microsoft Fabric items into Microsoft Fabric workspaces. At this moment in time there is a limited number of supported item types. However, that list is increasing.
Read on for the test. It currently supports a limit amount of functionality, but it looks promising.
Comments closedPatrick LeBlanc tells us what’s new:
There are a lot of exciting features for you this month! Here are some highlights: In Power BI, Explore from Copilot visual answers which lets you do easy ad-hoc exploration. In Data Warehouse, Browse files with OPENROWSET (Preview) and Copilot for Data Warehouse Chat (Preview). For Data Science, AI Skill is now conversational.
These are just some of the great features this month, keep reading to learn about all of what’s happened in Fabric this month.
Click through for the full report.
Comments closedMihir Wagle puts the kibosh on things:
On February 24, 2025, we launched Microsoft Fabric Quotas, a new feature designed to control resource governance for the acquisition of your Microsoft Fabric capacities. Fabric quotas aimed at helping customers ensure that Fabric resources are used efficiently and help manage the overall performance and reliability of the Azure platform while preventing misuse.
Note that these are not quotas you set on your users, but rather quotas that Microsoft sets on you.
Comments closedChris Webb has another way for scheduling refreshes:
I’m sure you already know how to configure scheduled refresh for your semantic models in Power BI. While the options you have for controlling when refresh takes place are generally good enough – you can configure daily or weekly refreshes and set up to eight times a day for refreshes to take place – there are some scenarios it doesn’t work for, such as monthly refreshes. Up to now the workaround has been to use Power Automate to trigger refreshes (see here for an example) or to call the refresh API from another application. Now, with Fabric, you have a much better option for scheduling refreshes: Data Pipelines.
Click through for the demonstration.
Comments closedConsider the following scenario:
- I am building a data platform on Microsoft Fabric, using Lakehouses as the primary storage engine.
- My end users need to consume data from the data platform as users of Power BI reports which connects to data from the Lakehouses, as developers of ad hoc models and report using data from the Lakehouses, and through ad hoc SQL queries on the Lakehouses.
- I want to use DirectLake for Power BI reports to take advantage of frequency data ingestion and transformation, and improve the actionability of my reports.
- My data is sensitive, and users, regardless of whether they consume reports or develop their own, need to be restricted by Row Level Security to only see some of the data.
Read on for eight different approaches to the problem and Jon’s thoughts on each approach.
Comments closedWhen building dynamic pipelines and other artifacts in Microsoft Fabric we are currently forced to reference everything using the underlying item IDs, rather than the more useful names (display names).
In the UI, setting a item value is fine when selecting items from the respective drop down lists. But they will of course be static and can’t be changed at runtime. However, as soon as an expression is required (which in the real world, always is) those UI labels change to be the ID values. AKA the item GUIDs in the context of the workspace and wider solution.
Paul has an answer, though it’s not pretty.
Comments closedA handy function to delete all Fabric items in a workspace. Run this in a Python notebook in the workspace you want to delete items from. Everything, except that notebook, will be deleted. You need to have contributor+ role in the workspace. Delete the last remaining notebook manually.
Read on for the script. This one’s pretty straightforward, so there isn’t a lot in the way of additional commentary.
Comments closedNicky van Vroenhoven continues a series on governance in Microsoft Fabric:
A short introduction to Domains: they are essentially a way of managing and structuring your data across the organization. You can logically group together data in workspaces. A logical grouping can be business units, areas, fields, solutions or actually whatever works for you. It shouldn’t be something a Fabric Admin decides on his own. Ideally business and / or enterprise architects with the data owners (if any) should implement the design of domains, subdomains and owners. People from you Center of Excellence (again: if available..) would be a good fit to include in this discussion.
In case you need some help or guidance on how to set up your domains, there’s a nice article that can help you get started: Best practices for planning and creating domains.
Click through to learn more about domains and default domain settings.
Comments closed