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Category: Microsoft Fabric

OneLake Security Updates

Published 2025-06-25 by Kevin Feasel

Aaron Merrill shares some news:

It’s been almost 3 months since we announced OneLake security at FabCon 2025 in Las Vegas, and while the interest has not slowed down, we’ve also been working behind the scenes to improve the feature and address your feedback. In this blog post, we’ll go through some of the latest updates on OneLake security including further support for OneLake shortcuts, improved RLS authoring, and updated permissions to manage OneLake security.

Read on to see what has changed.

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Inline Scalar UDFs in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse

Published 2025-06-24 by Kevin Feasel

Srdjan Martin has an announcement:

SQL native Scalar user-defined functions (UDFs) in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse and SQL analytics endpoint are now in preview.

A scalar UDF is a custom code implemented in T-SQL that accepts parameters, performs an action such as complex calculation, and returns a result of that action as a single value.

I wonder if the same advice for SQL Server will apply to these: don’t use them because they are performance sinks. Knowing that these are scalar functions, I’d be inclined to do some considerable performance testing before rolling them out.

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Tableau with Microsoft Fabric and Row-Level Security

Published 2025-06-24 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley expands beyond the Microsoft ecosystem:

Tableau led the self-service visual reporting revolution and now part of the Salesforce suite, it is bound to continue to have a loyal following and user base. The purpose of this article is not to compare Tableau to Power BI nor to expound on the strengths or perceived weaknesses of either product, but to share my experience and learnings about using Tableau with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI semantic models. I will demonstrate how to use Tableau with a Direct Lake semantic model, a large import mode semantic model and how effectively Tableau works securely with semantic model-based row-level security (RLS).

Read on for Paul’s findings. I do appreciate Paul’s ecumenical approach here. It’s fun to pick your favorite sports team (yay, Team SQL Server!) and razz fans of other teams (boo, Team Oracle!). And given how often I do just that, I can’t begrudge anyone the pleasure. But it’s also good to remember that tools deserve no loyalty except inasmuch as they provide value to you.

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It’s Always Permissions (or DNS)

Published 2025-06-24 by Kevin Feasel

Kristina Mishra takes us through troubleshooting a problem:

Ah, you’ve setup a deployment pipeline and let your people know it’s ready for them to do the thing. Everything looks fine on your end, so you shoot off a message to the group and go about your busy day. (Nevermind your Test environment was set up 4 months ago, Production 3 days ago, and Development was replaced 2 months ago with a new Development environment because your region changed.) You’ve added all the permission groups to each environment and added your “contributors” as Admin to the deployment pipeline (no comment), so everything should be grand.

Famous last words, indeed.

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The FabricTools Powershell Module

Published 2025-06-23 by Kevin Feasel

Kamil Nowinski has a module for us:

In the world of Microsoft Fabric, DevOps is still maturing. Unlike Azure Data Factory (ADF), which has been around long enough to have established tooling – like the #ADFTools I developed 5 years ago – Fabric is new, broad, and complex, in a very positive way!

Microsoft Fabric integrates data engineering, warehousing, real-time analytics, and BI. With this scale, the need for solid DevOps tooling is more critical than ever.

Click through to read a little bit of the history behind the project, as well as what’s currently available. And it’s all free and open-source.

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The New Item Creation Experience in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-06-19 by Kevin Feasel

Dan Liu has an announcement:

Have you ever found yourself frustrated by inconsistent item creation? Maybe you’ve struggled to select the right workspace or folder when creating a new item or ended up with a cluttered workspace due to accidental item creation.

We hear you—and we’re excited to introduce the new item creation experience in Fabric! This update is designed to address those pain points head-on. With the new unified creation flow, you’ll have a streamlined way to select the exact workspace and folder where your items belong. More importantly, this improvement brings consistency and cohesion to item creation across all Fabric items, so you can stay organized and productive.

Click through to see what it looks like.

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Result Set Caching in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse

Published 2025-06-17 by Kevin Feasel

Emily Tehrani makes an announcement:

Result Set Caching is now available in preview for Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse and Lakehouse SQL analytics endpoint. This performance optimization works transparently to cache the results of eligible T-SQL queries. When the same query is issued again, it directly retrieves the stored result, instead of recompiling and recomputing the original query. This operation drastically cuts execution time for complex queries. The cache is then automatically managed on the user’s behalf. This lightweight performance boost is most beneficial for workloads like reports, that issue many repetitive T-SQL queries to the DW and SQL analytics endpoint.

This is something I’ve wished we had on-premises for years and years, especially for data warehouses where you know the data only changes once every x hours or days. You can, of course, do this yourself with the cache-aside pattern and some caching solution, but that implies you have a layer between your end user and the data source that you fully control.

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Custom Libraries in Microsoft Fabric Data Engineering

Published 2025-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Gerhard Brueckl isn’t content with the defaults:

When working with Spark or data engineering in general in Microsoft Fabric, you will sooner or later come to the point where you need to reuse some of the code that you have already written in another notebook. Best practice is to put these code pieces into a central place from where it can be referenced and reused. This way you can make sure all notebooks always use the very same code and it is also easy to develop, update and test the common functions.

As Gerhard mentions, having common notebooks with utilities is fine for when you’re getting started with development, but being able to centralize functions in proper libraries can make that code a lot more useful, not just in the context of the single notebook.

I believe that this does allow for arbitrary code execution, so someone with sufficient permissions to create a notebook and import code from arbitrary locations would be able to execute that code. I think there are ways of limiting this risk (such as not allowing your Fabric hosts to connect to any remote servers other than ones you explicitly allow), but it’s something I’d have to puzzle through.

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Fronting Fabric APIs with Azure API Management

Published 2025-06-13 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Lima combines expensive with expensive:

Integrating Azure API Management (APIM) with Microsoft Fabric’s API for GraphQL can significantly enhance your API’s capabilities by providing robust scalability and security features such as identity management, rate limiting, and caching. This post will guide you through the process of setting up and configuring these features.

API Management is a really neat service, though it’s rather costly. That’s my biggest complaint about it, though it is a doozy.

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