Forum Discussion
Unable to Read Fabric Warehouse/Lakehouse DACPAC using Notepad or any Editor
Hi yashaswi_raj ,
Thanks for reaching out to Community Forum.This is expected behavior and not an issue with Microsoft Fabric. A DACPAC exported from a Fabric Warehouse or Lakehouse is not a plain text file, so opening it in Notepad will always look unreadable. In Fabric, a DACPAC represents a packaged database schema that is meant to be consumed by supported tools, not viewed directly as text. The correct way to inspect or work with it is to import it into a SQL Database Project (for example using Visual Studio or Azure Data Studio) or use SqlPackage to extract or deploy the schema. This confirms that the export itself is valid the limitation is simply that Notepad cannot interpret the DACPAC format.
Supporting Fabric documentation :
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/database/sql/overview
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/database/sql/sqlpackage
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-warehouse/develop-warehouse-project
Thank you.
DACPAC, like many MS file formats (docx, pbix) is just a zip file wearing a wig.
You can either rename it to .zip and open it in Windows that way or find a program to open it. If you need to do it programmatically, python will quite happily read zip files.
Alternatively, use the Extract function mentioned in the article to turn it all into a .sql file.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/tools/sql-database-projects/concepts/data-tier-applications/unpack-dacpac-file?view=sql-server-ver17
If this helps, please Accept as Solution to help others to find it more easily.
This answers the original question.
I am curious though, why are you trying to read the dacpac instead of deploying it?want to deploy the warehouse components only but since it has to read the lakehouse dacpac when any warehouse item has a refrence to lakehouse table , so my team wanted to check once we setuo the cicd do we need to evertime reupload the latest dacpac for lakehouse by building in vs code , in this process can one see the difference in both the dacpacs.
