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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Updating the Default Lakehouse of a Notebook

Published 2024-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar makes a change:

I have written about default lakehouse of a Fabric notebook before here and here. However, unless you used the notebook API, there was no easy/quick way of removing all/selective lakehouses or updating the default lakehouse of a notebook. But thanks to tip from Yi Lin from Notebooks product team, notebookutils.notebook.updateDefinition has two extra parameters, defaultLakehouse and defaultLakehouseWorkspace which can be used to update the default lakehouse of a notebook. You can also use it to update environment attached to a notebook. Below are some scenarios how it can be used.

Click through for those scenarios.

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Connecting to Power BI as a Guest User

Published 2024-09-20 by Kevin Feasel

Koen Verbeeck can only enter a tenant with explicit permission:

Sometimes your Microsoft Entra ID account (formerly known as Azure Active Directory) is added as a guest user in another tenant. This happens quite a lot when you’re a consultant and your client can’t create a new user in their own tenant, so they add the account of your own company as a guest instead. If you’re not a consultant, it can also happen after a merger or acquisition and you’re suddenly stuck with multiple tenants.

Yeah, this is a real annoyance with Microsoft Fabric / Power BI. Koen links to a 5-year-old feature request that I recommend upvoting.

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Domain Lineage in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2024-09-19 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar creates 1000 words of value:

In Fabric, you can use the Domains to create a data mesh architecture. It allows you to organize the data and items by specific business domains within the organization and make the overall data architecture decentralized. You can create domains within domains and assign workspaces to each domain. As it grows, you may find it challenging to understand how the domains & workspaces have been organized. Below code will help you trace the domains, subdomains and the workspaces assigned to them.

Click through to see how you can use the graphviz library in Python to generate a simple domain chart.

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Microsoft Fabric Direct Lake and Reframing Operations

Published 2024-09-10 by Kevin Feasel

Reza Rad changes the frame:

Power BI offers a new type of connection to Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse or Warehouse, called Direct Lake. The Direct Lake connection acts like DirectQuery and won’t need the data to be refreshed. However, the Power BI semantic model has refresh settings that can be turned on or off. In this article and video, you will learn about the Refresh settings for the Power BI semantic model that is connected using a Direct Lake connection, what that is, and why it is called Reframe.

Read on to learn more, or to check out the video.

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Microsoft Fabric Capacities and Reserved Instances

Published 2024-09-10 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld shares an experience:

Last week, I had a situation in which a client wanted to purchase a reserved instance Fabric capacity. Me being me, I assumed it would be super straight forward to purchase through Azure. However, at some point I was lost in the process where the official documentation confused even more. In the end, I figured out and managed to get a capacity running based on the Reserved Instance pricing. I didn’t find any other blogs or articles describing this confusion or specific case. Therefore, I decided to write down my thoughts and findings in a blog.

This blog is not only relevant if you work with Microsoft Fabric, but also for anyone currently working with Power BI Premium. Given the deprecation of Power BI Premium capacities, you have to switch to Fabric capacities sooner or later.

Read on to learn more about the differences between pay-as-you-go and reserved instance capacities, the process to make a reservation, and what comes after that before you have a Microsoft Fabric capacity ready to go.

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Querying a Fabric SQL Endpoint via Notebook and T-SQL

Published 2024-09-06 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar talks about a Spark connector:

I am not sharing anything new. The spark data warehouse connector has been available for a couple months now. It had some bugs, but it seems to be stable now. This connector allows you to query the lakehouse or warehouse endpoint in the Fabric notebook using spark. You can read the documentation for details but below is a quick pattern that you may find handy.

Despite it not being anything new, it is still interesting to see the use case of writing T-SQL instead of Spark SQL.

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Running a Microsoft Fabric Notebook via Azure DevOps

Published 2024-09-05 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant runs a notebook:

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

You can consider this post a follow-up to my last post about unit tests on Microsoft Fabric items. Since somebody asked me about automating notebooks and I wanted to show it in action.

Please note, currently the ability to call the API that runs a notebook on demand does not support service principals.

Despite that limitation, Kevin shows two ways to authenticate while calling the appropriate API.

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Granting Entra ID Guest Users Access to a Semantic Model via Excel

Published 2024-09-05 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers notes an implication:

Yes, you read that right, it is possible where you have shared Power BI semantic model with an external (guest user in Entra ID) they can now connect to the semantic model using Excel.

This has been around for quite a while I just did not know about it, here is the Microsoft documentation: Semantic model connectivity and management with the XMLA endpoint in Power BI – Power BI | Microsoft Learn

The first thing to note is that this currently only works in the Excel Desktop App.

I did try using Excel on the Web and unfortunately that did not work.

I then created my Excel file, uploaded to SharePoint Online and tried to interact with the Excel Pivot table and that too did not work.

Ok enough of the limitations let me show you how to get it working.

Click through to see how. Gilbert also has an important note about row-level security, co read the whole thing.

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Building an App to Use Fabric AI Skills Locally

Published 2024-09-04 by Kevin Feasel

Sandeep Pawar takes us on-premises:

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you probably know I have been testing Fabric AI Skills extensively. I have written three blogs so far on various ways the AI Skills endpoint can be used. The feature is still in preview but I am excited to see how it can be used to create new solutions as it matures.

I was curious to test if the AI Skills endpoint can be used locally and in other applications. This will open many opportunities to integrate it in different tools, inside and outside of Fabric ecosystem. So, I built an app using Gradio to make API calls to the endpoint and show the results in a local browser along with interactive plots.

Click through for a link to the code and some instructions on how to build it yourself.

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