Author: Nadav Schachter - Senior Product Manager
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The OneLake Catalog helps people find, explore, and curate Fabric items across their organization. With OneLake Catalog Search API, MCP and CLI tools, that same discovery experience is now available programmatically, making it possible to build search directly into scripts, internal tools, and agentic workflows.
Search across workspaces
The OneLake Catalog Search REST API brings cross-workspace discovery to code. Instead of traversing workspace-by-workspace and “listing everything,” a single search request can locate matching items across your accessible estate based on catalog metadata.
Search is designed to help even when the exact name isn’t known. Free-text matching includes the item’s display name and description, so a keyword you remember is often enough to find the right entry. Results can be filtered by the item's type to narrow down the scope of your search.
The set of supported metadata signals and filters is expected to grow, enabling richer and more targeted discovery scenarios.
Search results return lightweight metadata representations ("CatalogEntry" objects) intended for discovery. They don’t grant access to underlying data or item content. Instead, results include stable identifiers that can be used with complementary Fabric APIs to retrieve additional details or continue with downstream workflows.
Build your own catalog
Discovery is . You might want to build a catalog browsing experience within your own app. For example, showing users a curated list of Fabric items they can access (such as “all Lakehouses and Reports” or even "all accessible items") and enabling navigation from that list.
The Search API can power this experience by returning metadata for matching items across all workspaces.
Let your agent do the work
The catalog search capability is also included as a built-in tool in the Fabric Core MCP Server so AI agents can locate the right Fabric asset as part of a broader workflow, then continue with follow up actions using other tools.
Example prompts:
- “Find Lakehouses related to sales reporting and show the top matches.”
- "Which workspaces have items matching finance in the description?”
- "Get details for the sales report Q1 report"
Your terminal just got a lot more observant
The Fabric CLI now supports a find command for cross-workspace discovery right from the terminal. Type fab find 'sales report' and the CLI searches the OneLake catalog across all workspaces you have access to.
Filter by item type, exclude specific types or combine multiple types using p bracket syntax. Need IDs for scripting? Add -l for the detailed view. Want to reshape the output? Pipe through a JMESPath query with q.
In interactive mode, results page naturally with 30 items at a time. In command-line mode, the CLI fetches everything automatically, making it easy to compose with other tools. Whether you're tracking down a dataset across a sprawling tenant or building automation scripts that need to resolve item locations, fab find keeps you in the terminal.
Looking ahead
Over time, the OneLake Catalog Search API is planned to expand beyond items to additional Fabric entities, while continuing to offer a single, consistent search endpoint that tools and integrations can rely on.
Get started
Explore the details in Catalog – Search – REST API (Core) and OneLake catalog overview to get started today!