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Category: Microsoft Fabric

Comparing Spark Application Performance in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-09-24 by Kevin Feasel

Jenny Jiang announces a new capability:

The Spark Applications Comparison feature is now in preview in Microsoft Fabric. This new capability empowers developers and data engineers to analyze, debug, and optimize Spark performance across multiple application runs—whether you’re tracking changes from code updates or data variations to improve performance.

The image in the blog post is pretty small and hard to read, but I do wonder if (or how well) it will capture cases where you’re twiddling your thumbs to get a machine so that you can execute your code. This seems to be a big problem sometimes.

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Microsoft Fabric Extension for VS Code now GA

Published 2025-09-23 by Kevin Feasel

Sunitha Muthukrishna announces an update to an extension:

Manage Fabric items programmatically: Use item definitions to unlock scripting and work with your items as files. You can update and deploy Fabric items to existing workspaces or new workspaces directly from VS Code—saving you time and effort. Fabric items, that have Item definitions API support, support this capability.

Read on to see what else made the cut.

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Tracking when Workspace Monitoring Throttles Power BI Queries

Published 2025-09-22 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb wants to know if Workspace Monitoring is throttling any Power BI queries in Microsoft Fabric:

A lot of new documentation was published recently around Fabric capacities, including documentation on how to size and govern capacities and how to troubleshoot problems with capacities. The latter has instructions on how to use the Capacity Metrics App to determine if your Power BI queries are being throttled; it mentions that you can also determine if queries have been throttled using Workspace Monitoring or Log Analytics but doesn’t go into details about how, something I will address in this post.

Read on to learn more.

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Microsoft Fabric September 2025 Updates

Published 2025-09-16 by Kevin Feasel

Adam Saxton has a list of updates for us:

Welcome to the Fabric September 2025 Feature Summary! This month’s update is packed with exciting enhancements, such as new certification opportunities, the Power BI DataViz World Championships at FabCon Vienna, and major advancements in the Fabric Platform. Highlights include the Parent-Child Hierarchy in the OneLake catalog, the general availability of the Govern Tab and Domains Public APIs and expanded Microsoft Purview protection and data loss prevention policies. Dive in to discover the latest improvements designed to empower your data experience.

Click through for a few dozen items.

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Finding Power BI Operations from the Capacity Metrics App

Published 2025-09-15 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb notes something that has come out recently:

It’s the week of Fabcon Europe and you’re about to be overwhelmed with new Fabric feature announcements. However there is a new blink-and-you’ll-miss-it feature that appeared in the latest version of the Fabric Capacity Metrics App (released on 11th September 2025, version 47) that won’t get any fanfare but which I think is incredibly useful – it allows you to link the Power BI operations (such as queries or refreshes) you see in the Capacity Metrics App back to Workspace Monitoring, Log Analytics or Profiler so you can get details such as the query text.

Click through to see how it works.

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No More Default Semantic Models in Microsoft Fabric

Published 2025-09-09 by Kevin Feasel

Nicky van Vroenhoven has good news for us:

Another quick post, because today is an important day for everyone working with Fabric and Power BI!

Last month, Microsoft announced they are Sunsetting Default Semantic Models: Yaay! 
Today marks that day: No more automatic child semantic models!

The idea of having a default semantic model seemed like a good one, but the problem was that too many environments had very specific needs that a default semantic model couldn’t anticipate or address. As a result, these tended to confuse end users more than save them time.

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The Consequences of Hitting Semantic Model Guardrails

Published 2025-09-08 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Webb smashes into a wall:

Direct Lake mode in Power BI allows you to build semantic models on very large volumes of data, but because it is still an in-memory database engine there are limits on how much data it can work with. As a result it has rules – called guardrails – that it uses to check whether you are trying to build a semantic model that is too large. But what happens when you hit those guardrails? This week one of my colleagues, Gaurav Agarwal, showed me the results of some tests that he did which I thought I would share here.

Click through to see what happens when you go past one of those guardrails.

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What’s New in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse

Published 2025-09-04 by Kevin Feasel

Sowmya Sivaraman has an update:

Welcome to the August 2025 edition of What’s New in Fabric Warehouse. As summer winds down, despite August being a slower month, our team continued to deliver meaningful updates. We shipped several new features focused on enhancing data ingestion, improving the data management, and streamlining security. At the same time, much of our energy is going into preparing exciting announcements for FabCon Vienna — stay tuned for what’s coming next. Whether you’re optimizing workloads, building with SQL, or exploring new integrations, this roundup highlights improvements we think you’ll find valuable.

Click through for a list of changes.

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Comparing Microsoft Fabric Consumption for Notebooks and Warehouse SQL Queries

Published 2025-09-03 by Kevin Feasel

Gilbert Quevauvilliers performs a comparison:

I saw that there was an update where it is now possible to use the Microsoft Fabric Warehouse to copy data directly from OneLake into the Warehouse.

This got me thinking, which would consume more capacity to get the data into the Warehouse table. As well as which one would be faster.

To do this I am going to be running a SQL query in the Warehouse.

Next, I will use a Notebook to copy the data from the OneLake files section to a Warehouse table.

Gilbert’s specific query involves loading data from a variety of CSV files into a lakehouse via notebook, and then into a warehouse table. Read on for the results.

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Dataflows Gen2 Tips and Tricks

Published 2025-09-03 by Kevin Feasel

Jon Vöge provides advice on the least beloved ELT process:

Dataflows Gen2 are frequently (and often rightfully so) bashed for their performance inefficiencies. Especially in comparison with other ingestion and transformation tools in Fabric (Notebooks, Pipelines, Copy Jobs, SPROCs).

The fact remains however, that in the hands of a self-service developer, they are an incredibly powerful tool – if you can spare the compute on your capacity.

In this article, I will highlight tips and tricks to make the most of working with Dataflow Gen2 in Fabric. The list is by no means exhaustive, but simply consists of a bunch of tips which I found useful in the past year, including new and overlooked features, as well as old best practices:

Read on for some things that are new to Dataflows Gen2, working with SharePoint, and making data loads not quite as slow.

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