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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Model Documentation via Fabric Data Agent

Published 2025-05-05 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb gets some answers:

AI is meant to help us automate boring tasks, and what could be more boring than creating documentation for your Power BI semantic models? It’s such a tedious task that most people don’t bother; there’s also an ecosystem of third party tools that do this job for you, and you can also build your own solution for this using DAX DMVs or the new-ish INFO functions (see here for a good example). That got me wondering: can you use Fabric Data Agents to generate documentation for you? And what’s more, why even generate documentation when you can just ask a Data Agent the questions that you’d need to generate documentation to answer?

For a simple scenario, Chris was able to get pretty solid results. As complexity grows, your mileage may vary.

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Medallion Architecture in Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

Published 2025-05-02 by Kevin Feasel

Tyler Chessman is like an onion:

Building a multi-layer, medallion architecture using Fabric Real-Time Intelligence (RTI) requires a different approach compared to traditional data warehousing techniques. But even transactional source systems can be effectively processed in RTI. To demonstrate, we’ll look at how sales orders (created in a relational database) can be continuously ingested and transformed through a RTI bronze, silver, and gold layer.

Read on to see how.

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Tracking Query Lineage in Microsoft Fabric Lakehouses

Published 2025-05-02 by Kevin Feasel

Dennes Torres wants to know who is your daddy and what does he do:

If you check the text of the queries, at the end of the text you will find content like this:

OPTION (label = N”{“DatasetId”:”1269551b-bf26-47de-b0f0-974fa60f7b08″,”Sources”:[{“ReportId”:”01ab9208-399a-47ec-b444-d03633fc3e1d”,”VisualId”:”30ac676503a0bd357312″,”Operation”:”AutoPageRefresh”}]}”)

This has an interesting meaning:

  • We can use this information to track the query lineage
  • Applications can send lineage (or more) to SQL using OPTION (LABEL) statement

Click through to learn how you can use this information.

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Power BI in a Microsoft Fabric World

Published 2025-05-01 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck answers a question:

We’re a relatively small shop that has been using Power BI for our analytical needs for years now. We’re very pleased with the product, but the recent introduction of Microsoft Fabric has made us a bit anxious. When comparing Microsoft Fabric vs Power BI, it all seems very complex and we’re not even sure we need it. What will happen with Power BI? Will it be replaced with Fabric?

Click through for Koen’s advice and thoughts on the matter.

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April 2025 Updates for Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-05-01 by Kevin Feasel

Patrick LeBlanc is back with another compendium:

Welcome to the Fabric April 2025 Feature Summary! This update brings exciting advancements across various workloads, including Low-code AI tools to accelerate productivity in notebooks (Preview), session Scoped distributed #temp table in Fabric Data Warehouse (Generally Available) and the Migration assistant for Fabric Data Warehouse (Preview) to simplify your migration experience.

This one isn’t quite as long as last month’s release, but there are still a couple dozen entries.

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Permissions to Execute Fabric Data Factory REST API Calls

Published 2025-05-01 by Kevin Feasel

Andy Leonard doesn’t need to ask for permission:

The problem we are trying to solve is: Grant an Azure Data Factory permission to execute the ReST API method calls against artifacts in a Fabric workspace.

I begin visiting the Azure Portal. If you don’t have an Azure account, you can create one. You can do a lot of things in Azure for little money, but you need an account and that account needs to be secured by a working source of funds in case you leave a virtual machine running for days. Hypothetically. BE CAREFUL. DO NOT LEAVE A VM RUNNING FOR DAYS.

Good en passant advice. I once blew through a $250 Azure credit by laving an HDInsight cluster on for, uh, a few hours.

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Reading Delta Tables via SQL Code in a Microsoft Fabric Python Notebook

Published 2025-04-30 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers writes a SQL statement:

I come from a TSQL background, so using SQL makes it easy for me to work with data.

There are multiple ways to use SQL in a PySpark notebook, and when I started using a Python notebook it was not so straightforward.

In this blog post I will show you how I use SQL Code.

As mentioned previously I am by no means an expert, I typically find a way that works, is fast and doesn’t consume a lot of capacity. If that works consistently for me then that is how I go about it.

Click through for the solution, which uses DuckDB. As such, the SQL syntax isn’t T-SQL—it’s more like psql. But it does do a great job of interacting with Parquet files and Delta tables.

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From Power BI Premium Capacity to Fabric Capacity

Published 2025-04-29 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge performs a migration:

So your old Power BI Premium Capacity has run/is running out, and your organization is acquiring a new Fabric Capacity to replace it.

Perhaps the organization even decided to take the chance to move the capacity region to something a little closer to home?

If you find yourself in this situation, how do you best migrate your contents of one Capacity to another?

Read on as Jon explains the migration process within a region (which is very easy) and the migration process if you need to go cross-region (which is rather cumbersome).

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Executing a Fabric Data Pipeline from Azure Data Factory

Published 2025-04-29 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck leaves the confines of Microsoft Fabric:

In the blog post Call a Fabric REST API from Azure Data Factory I explained how you can call a Fabric REST API endpoint from Azure Data Factory (or Synapse if you will). Let’s go a step further and execute a Fabric Data Pipeline from an ADF pipeline, which is a common request. A Fabric capacity cannot auto-resume, so you typically have an ADF pipeline that starts the Fabric capacity. After the capacity is started, you want to kick-off your ETL pipelines in Fabric and now you can do this from ADF as well.

Click through for the process. Though do check the warnings that Koen offers around either spending extra money by remaining in synchronous execution mode, or always getting a positive result in asynchronous execution mode, regardless of whether the underlying Fabric Data Pipeline worked or not.

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Temp Table Bugs in Microsoft Fabric Warehouses

Published 2025-04-29 by Kevin Feasel

Jared Westover runs into a wall:

I was excited when Microsoft announced the ability to create session-scoped temporary tables in a Fabric warehouse. However, after using Microsoft Fabric temporary tables, I quickly felt disappointed. When will they be ready for prime time, and in the meantime, what other options are available?

Click through for Jared’s experience, although it might already be fixed.

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