Issue Ingesting Delta Sharing Tables with Deletion Vectors in Fabric Lakehouse Notebooks

Hi,

This is a known limitation in the current Fabric Spark runtime, it doesn't natively support reading Delta Sharing tables that have Deletion Vectors enabled. Here's why and what you can do about it.

Why it fails:

The Fabric Spark runtime cannot interpret Deletion Vectors metadata embedded in Parquet files. Delta Sharing's REST API also doesn't support the responseFormat: delta mode required for Deletion Vectors. And unlike Databricks, Fabric Lakehouse notebooks don't allow attaching external JARs (spark.jars.packages is restricted).

Reference: Delta Lake table format interoperability — Microsoft Learn

Workarounds (from most to least practical):

Ask the data provider to create a Deletion Vector-free view/table If they can run REORG TABLE <table_name> APPLY (PURGE) on their side, it physically removes deletion vectors by rewriting Parquet files. This is the cleanest solution.

Use an intermediate landing zone outside Fabric

Read the Delta Sharing table from an Azure Databricks notebook (which supports Deletion Vectors natively)
Write the result as clean Parquet/Delta to an ADLS Gen2 location
Use a Fabric Shortcut or Copy Activity to bring it into your Lakehouse
# In Databricks notebook
df = spark.read.format("deltaSharing").load("<profile>#<share>.<schema>.<table>")
df.write.format("delta").mode("overwrite").save("abfss://<container>@<storage>.dfs.core.windows.net/clean_landing/")
Then in Fabric, create a OneLake shortcut pointing to that ADLS Gen2 path.

Use Fabric Data Pipeline with Copy Activity Instead of notebooks, use a Pipeline Copy Activity with the source configured as the external storage where the provider can export data. This bypasses the Spark runtime entirely.

Submit a feature request on Fabric Ideas (which you already did — great move!) The Fabric team is actively working on expanding Delta Lake feature support. Deletion Vectors support in the Spark runtime is one of the most requested features.

Reference: Delta Table Maintenance in Microsoft Fabric

Hope this helps! Give a kudos. Let me know if you need more details on the intermediate landing zone approach.