A Fine Slice Of SQL Server
Pankaj Arora announces a new preview feature:
Until now, surge protection applied only at the capacity level—meaning all workspaces shared the same rules.
What’s new: workspace-level surge protection
We’re taking surge protection to the next level with workspace-level controls. This update gives you more granular management of compute usage across your organization.
Read on to see what this means for organizations using Microsoft Fabric.
Comments closedLaura Graham-Brown continues a series on variable libraries in Microsoft Fabric:
Lakehouse shortcuts are a popular addition to the Fabric set of tools to access data easily without copying it. Using a variable library in lakehouse shortcuts means its easy to point shortcuts to an alternative location. This great for ALM using development, test and production workspaces.
Read on to see how it all works.
Comments closedAaron Merrill announces a new preview offering:
Microsoft Fabric continues to expand the OneLake security surface with new granular REST API support for role management, giving developers and platform teams far more control over how security policies are created, retrieved, and managed programmatically. In addition to the existing batch role API, Fabric now offers discrete Create, Get, and Delete role APIs, making it easier to build incremental, automation-friendly security workflows that align with modern DevOps and governance practices.
Click through for a quick explanation of how things did work and how they will work going forward.
Comments closedMichal Bar makes an announcement:
Performance matters—especially when you’re exploring live data and making decisions in real time. We have released a set of improvements, all aiming to make Real-Time Dashboards faster, smoother, and more responsive, based directly on what our customers and community told us.
Read on to see what has changed.
What hasn’t changed is my complaint about the term “real-time.” But let’s be honest: I realize it’s a war I’m not going to win.
Comments closedThis update introduces several enhancements to native incremental copy and change data capture (CDC) capabilities in Copy job, including support for additional data source stores for incremental copy, expanded CDC support for SAP Datasphere Outbound for Amazon S3 and Google Cloud Storage (in addition to Microsoft Cloud Storage), and Column Mapping support for CDC in Copy job.
Click through to see what has changed in the copy job.
Comments closedLaura Graham-Brown makes use of a variable library:
You’ve set up your variable pipeline with WorkspaceIDs and LakehouseIDs etc etc Now you want to use that variable library in a data pipeline so we can use the common values and they will behave in a deployment pipeline.
Read on to see how it all works.
Comments closedPaul Turley describes a job role:
Analytics Engineer – The DP-600 exam contains elements of both data analytics and data engineering with a business focus. It is the fence-sitter between the disciplined worlds of data engineering and the abstract creativity of analytics. An Analytics Engineer bridges data engineering and analytics by building enterprise-ready solutions in Microsoft Fabric. Combines skills in SQL, DAX, and KQL with expertise in data modeling and performance optimization. They design and manage dataflows, create semantic models, optimize datasets, and ensure governance to deliver curated, analytics-ready data assets for reporting and analysis.
Read on to see how this role fits and some of the things a person performing this role should know and be able to do.
Comments closedAndy Brownsword deploys an app:
When using Power BI or Fabric workspaces to browse reports, we’re greeted with a list of items and their attributes. While attention is given to report visuals such as bars, pies, candles, and RAG highlights, the surrounding experience is neglected. When it comes to consumption, the standard interface falls short.
Apps fill this gap. They’ve been around in Power BI for a while, but with the additional layers that come with Fabric, the need for a clean way to present content is increasingly valuable.
Read on to learn about more functionality around apps and how you can set them up in Fabric/Power BI.
Comments closedTom Peplow makes an announcement:
In October 2025, we introduced OneLake diagnostics—a powerful capability that helps teams “answer who accessed what, when, and how” across your Fabric Lakehouse environment. OneLake diagnostics streams JSON-based activity logs into a Lakehouse you choose, enabling rich analysis, governance, and compliance workflows. A powerful capability that helps teams “answer who accessed what, when, and how” across your Fabric Lakehouse environment. OneLake diagnostics streams JSON-based activity logs into a Lakehouse you choose, enabling rich analysis, governance, and compliance workflows.
We are strengthening that foundation with the introduction of immutable diagnostic logs—a new capability that ensures diagnostic events cannot be altered or deleted for a defined retention period, giving you tamper-proof data for the entire lifecycle of your logs.
I do like the idea, but beware the additional costs: immutable also means you can’t delete it later, so 10 years from now, you’re still going to be paying for this diagnostic data.
Comments closedGilbert Quevauvilliers puts on the lab coat and safety goggles:
I was recently part of a discussion (which I have heard of multiple times), which was which semantic model to use in Microsoft Fabric.
This was the source for this blog post where I am going to compare Microsoft Direct Lake (DL) to an Import Semantic Model. The goal is to first explain how I set up and configured the comparison.
And in the next blog post I will show the tests and the outcome based on my testing.
This is the first part in a series and covers the setup process for testing. We’ll have to wait until next time for the results.
Comments closed