Ownership of Fabric Items

[Srisakthi]

Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end, AI-powered data platform that integrates all stages of the data lifecycle such as ingestion, preparation, storage, analysis, and visualization into a single, cloud-based experience.

When a user leaves the organization, or if they don't sign in for more than 90 days, it's possible that any Fabric items they own will stop working correctly.

The Fabric items created by them are inoperative until ownership is transferred. Taking ownership of a parent item automatically transfers all associated child items, except for notebook activities and other related items in data pipelines, which must be taken over separately.

Let’s deep dive into ownership take over of Microsoft Fabric items.

1. What are all the items supported for ownership transfer
2. What kind of identity’s are supported for each item
3. How do we change via Powershell or portal?

Fabric Items	Ownership Change	Identity Type	Portal/ Powershell
Lakehouse	Available	User	Portal
Warehouse	Available	User/ SPN*	Portal/ Powershell
Notebook	Available	User	Portal
Data Pipeline	Available	User	Portal
Spark Environment	Available	User	Portal
Data Flow Gen2	Available	User	Portal
Semantic Model	Available	User	Portal
Data Agent	Available	User	Portal
Reports	Not Available	NA	NA

If Service Principal Name (SPN) to be set as Owner then powershell script to be utilised. This SPN change can be done only for warehouse. Other Fabric-item takeover doesn’t support for Ownership takeover as SPN.

Mirrored Databases are not support for Ownership change. We have to create new mirrored databases.

How to transfer Ownership:

Navigate to any supported Fabric items, click on settings, as highlighted below you can see Take over option

Once Take Over option is clicked then you will see the below screenshot for the confirmation and click Take over button , then automatically it will get transferred to your name.

As of now changing ownership to Service Principal is not available for items except warehouse.

Citations

Warehouse Ownership change - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-warehouse/change-ownership?tabs=portal

Item Ownership change - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/fundamentals/item-ownership-take-over

[derrick777]

There are many articles about how to transfer item ownership, but I miss documentation about the purpose and consquences of ownership. Can you tell me why it is needed? What are the consequences? What can an owner achieve with an item in contrast to another member or contributor of the workspace? Is it used for authentication to other items or to items cross workspaces? Thanks for clarification!

[Srisakthi]

Transfer of ownership is important in scenario where the person who created the fabric Items left the project or company, as those items will not function and will throw an error Identity is not available. In such cases to make your jobs/schedules to work properly you have to do ownership transfer. 

[derrick777]

Hello Srisakthi,

Thanks for your answer. Actually, this piece of information is well known and documented. I would like to get more general information about the purpose.  What can an owner achieve with an item in contrast to another member or contributor of the workspace? Is it used for authentication to other items or to items cross workspaces? 

Best regards, Andreas

[apturlov]

@Srisakthi thanks for posting this useful information. Could you clarify how ownership applies when an item is not created manually but deployed using a built-in deployment pipeline or using fabric cli or any other way when the item is copied using an identity different from the original creator?

[Srisakthi]

Hi @apturlov ,

If an item is deployed via Service Principal then each item will have the Owner as Service Principal and if you want to take over you can do so by traversing to the settings of each item. I would suggest to keep it as Service Principal as Owner for all the items. If it has individual user then if that user left the organisation , your items will not work as expected. 

Note: For Service Principal also we need to keep an eye and do renewal if it expired.

Regards,

Sri

[derrick777]

Hello @Srisakthi, if the service principal is item owner of the target stage, you won't be able to manage Deployment Rules anymore. That simply won't work, only Item Owner can manage deployment rules, and you can't log in as service principal.

Regards, Andreas

[Srisakthi]

Hi @derrick777 ,

I have given that solution for Terraform and Azure Devops pipeline, not for Fabric Deployment pipeline.

We can login via Service Prinicpal using Powershell or CLI.

Regards,

Sri

[Olayemi_Awofe]

Considering the fact that we had issue like this at work, transfer of ownership safe us the headache