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Welcome to the March Feature Summary!
From the innovative Variable library (Preview) to the powerful Service Principal support in the CI/CD features, there's a lot to explore. Dive in and discover how the new Partner Workloads in Fabric bring cutting-edge capabilities to your workspace. Plus, enhanced OneLake security ensures your data is protected. And don't miss out on the expanded regional availability for Eventstream's managed private endpoints, making it easier for organizations worldwide to build secure, scalable streaming solutions.
With FabCon kicking off today, the announcements are rolling in! Get ready to explore these features and more in the March 2025 updates for Fabric!
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Additionally, we've made significant enhancements to Reference Lines, enabling you to add shade areas for all reference line types and support reference lines on the Y-axis for Line and stacked column charts. The Category enhancements for new cards bring new styles for categories, including table style and cards style, with conditional formatting options. Dive in to explore these exciting features and see how they can help you make the most of your data.
To find out more about these features and more, head over to the Power BI March 2025 Feature Summary.
https://youtu.be/2ft7aZKnaXY?si=_5tz-qmlC6NiL4nF
What is the Variable Library?
The Variable library is a new item type in Microsoft Fabric that allows users to define and manage variables at the workspace level, so they could soon be used across various workspace items, such as data pipelines (already available!), notebooks, Shortcut for lakehouse and more.
Key features and benefits
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different sets of values for your variables, e.g. one for each stage of your release pipeline. This means you can easily switch configurations based on the deployment environment, such as development, testing, and production.
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3. Support for multiple Variable types: The Variable library supports various variable types, including boolean, integer, number, string, GUID, and DateTime. This flexibility allows you to define and use variables that best suit your needs.
Fabric items supporting Variable library
The Variable library is supported soon through various fabric items:
The new CI/CD feature of the Variable library will be available in early April in Microsoft Fabric and requires admin approval. Try it out starting mid-April 2025 and be part of this exciting journey!
What is Fabric Variable library? To learn more, refer to the Variable library documentation.
Service Principal support
The following set of APIs will start supporting Service Principal as well:
Calling Git APIs when working with Azure DevOps as your git provider is still being worked on and will be released in the upcoming few months. Please stay tuned and thank you for your patience!If you want to learn more about how to automate your CI/CD process in Fabric, you can use one of the following resources:
When working in Fabric using Source control, we recommend working on your own feature branch in an isolated environment. In Fabric, this means you need another workspace. We have made this process easy with the ability to ‘branch out’, landing you directly in a new workspace, already connected and synced to the new branch.
Now, we are making things even easier, as you can branch out to an existing workspace.
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If you have your own developer workspace, you don’t need to create another one to work on your next task. You can simply choose the same workspace, which already has all settings configured and data in place and continues working instantly after connecting it to the new branch.
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The Workload Hub is Fabric’s in-product marketplace for Partners that natively integrated with Fabric to provide our community with the ability to try and purchase leading data applications performing from data storage, transformation and connectivity tools to MDM platforms and visualization - all in the native Fabric experience we know and love!
Add a workload in the workload hub describes how customers can add and manage workloads that have been published as Fabric Workloads.
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Check out the Partner Workloads section in this blog to learn which workloads were released in the past month.
By using the Workload Development Kit, developers can embed new capabilities in Microsoft Fabric, streamline analytics processes, and explore new avenues for revenue generation.
We are introducing several new functionalities that will empower our community to build more integrated workloads for Fabric independently.
OneLake integration
Workloads can now leverage the new OneLake integration, which allows for storing both structured and unstructured data directly as part of the partner workload item. This integration enables customers to access the data through standard OneLake APIs and expose it as a data item in the OneLake catalog. Importantly, all customer data is stored and protected within the customer tenant.
Enhanced navigation experience
We have improved the navigation experience over the Workload Development Kit. The community can now build workloads that open new tabs and navigate directly to other items within the workspace, providing a smoother and more intuitive user experience.
Promoting Workload Solutions
In response to requests from workload developers, we are excited to introduce support for embedding videos on the workload page. Additionally, we have rolled out new Fabric monetization guidelines that the community can utilize as part of the Fabric UX system.
Real-Time Intelligence integration
For workload developers, we have extended our example to include Real-Time Intelligence. Partners can now use the Event House selector in their workloads to offer customers rich real-time experiences. We have also included an example of how to use the real-time APIs and execute queries against the Event House.
There are several additional changes that are helping the community build new workloads. Be sure to check out the Workload Development Kit - Announcing OneLake support and Developer Experience enhancements to learn more.
By providing the ability to apply additional metadata to items in Fabric, tags help admins and data owners categorize the data, enhancing the searchability and boosts success rates and efficiency for end users.
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To learn more on Tags in Microsoft Fabric refer to our documentation.
In the OneLake catalog, the tagging experience has been further refined with context-aware applied tags. Now, when users filter data by tags, they will only see relevant tags applicable to their current context instead of browsing through the entire organization’s tag collection. This enhancement reduces clutter and improves efficiency when searching for tagged assets.
We have improved the visibility of the selected domain within OneLake catalog and enriched the domain image gallery with new, vivid imagery.
Now, when users filter by domain in OneLake catalog they'll see the domain's cover image displayed in the background. This will create more clarity for users in their current context as they browse the catalog.
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Coming soon - create Tags in domains
Domain admins will soon be able to create a list of tags in their domain.
Item owners will be able to apply these tags to their items within the domain and data consumers will be able to use them to filter and search relevant data.
For more information, refer to Announcing a new modern data connectivity and discovery experience in Dataflows.
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DLP coverage with this enhancement:
DLP policies restrict access action for lakehouses
DLP Policies in Fabric help organizations detect sensitive information within their tabular data and surface it to end users and security administrators through policy tips, audit logs and alerts.
The Restrict Access Action allows further control over data items once sensitive information has been discovered, by enabling security admins to define who can access the item upon DLP detection.
This announcement means that once sensitive information is found within Fabric Lakehouse, unauthorized users will be blocked from accessing it until the data is removed. Items can be blocked from all users (excluding the data owners who always maintain access) or from guest users in the tenant.
Learn more about Restrict Access in DLP in Fabric.
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For more information refer to the Distribute Power BI content to external guest users with Microsoft Entra B2B documentation.
https://youtu.be/qilDzEjPig4?si=qmQxTeaeBhjoPJIL
With OneLake security, you define access once, and Fabric enforces it consistently across all engines. Data owners can create security roles, grant precise permissions, and control access at the row and column level—for example, restricting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) while keeping other data available. This security propagates automatically, ensuring that whether users query via SQL or build Power BI reports, they only see what they’re authorized to access. OneLake security replaces the existing OneLake data access roles preview feature.
Users start by creating OneLake security roles that grant access to specific data in a lakehouse. In addition to selecting tables and folders, OneLake security also allows for row and column level security to be defined. Using T-SQL, table access can be restricted to only specific rows where the T-SQL statement is true. To secure entire columns, roles can contain column level security definitions that block access to the sensitive columns. Assign members to your role to grant them access to only the allowed items in that role.
With the role created, users can use any Fabric engine to query the data and see consistent results. Any queries through a Spark notebook are secured with OneLake security. The SQL Analytics Endpoint now uses the OneLake security definition to secure data when running in user’s identity mode. Semantic models can use Direct Lake mode to secure data using the security from OneLake. Even if users access the data in OneLake directly through API calls or OneLake file explorer, users are always restricted by the relevant OneLake security roles.
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OneLake security will be preview in the coming months, sign up for early access.
Head over to OneLake security documentation for more information.
External data sharing enhancements
We have recently released several much-anticipated enhancements to the external data sharing feature. External data sharing allows in-place sharing of OneLake data across tenant boundaries. These updates include support for sharing multiple tables and folders, as well as entire Lakehouse schemas. Changes made to a shared lakehouse schema are automatically and immediately reflected in the consumer’s Lakehouse. Additionally, externally shared tables can now be consumed via the lakehouse’s SQL Analytics Endpoint and Semantic model, enabling seamless integration with Power BI reports.
We have also expanded the types of data that can be shared to include KQL and SQL databases and introduced service principal support in the external data sharing APIs for automated management. For more details, check out the full announcement of external data sharing
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You can learn more about how to expand your data estate with OneLake SAS in the OneLake documentation: What is a OneLake shared access signature.
https://youtu.be/qilDzEjPig4?si=qmQxTeaeBhjoPJIL
Additionally, we are excited to announce PySpark support for this connector. This means you no longer need to use a workaround to utilize this connector in PySpark, as it is now available as a native capability in PySpark. The connector will be included as a default library within the Fabric Runtime, eliminating the need for separate installation.
To learn more about Spark Connector for Fabric Data Warehouse (DW), please refer to the documentation: Spark connector for Fabric Data Warehouse.
We are pleased to share that Microsoft and Esri have partnered to bring spatial analytics into Microsoft Fabric and have launched public preview. Our collaboration with Esri introduces cutting-edge visual spatial analytics right within Microsoft Fabric Spark notebooks and Spark job definitions (across both Data Engineering and Data Science experiences).
With its integrated product experience, it empowers Spark developers or data scientists to natively use ArcGIS capabilities to run GeoAnalytics functions and tools within Fabric Spark for transformation, enrichment, and pattern / trend analysis of data across different use cases without any need for separate installation and configuration.
Example - How to transform the data with ArcGIS spatial function to uncover the pattern of interest, for instance summarizing the total number of policies of insured properties by hexagonal bins:
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Example - Understand the impact of natural hazards or current events on insured properties by bringing a dataset with probabilities of hurricane force winds and spatially joining it with insured properties. Spatial join links insured properties with wind speed probabilities, and with that for each property we would know the likelihood of hurricane force winds and can run predictive models to assess potential insurance claims.
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To learn more about this integration and capabilities, please refer to the documentation: ArcGIS GeoAnalytics for Microsoft Fabric (Preview).
Before triggering the deployment, you can verify the detail difference with the ‘Compare’ view.
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After the deployment is done, in the target stage/workspace, a new SJD item will be created based on the state from the source stage/workspace, and the association with other artifacts, such as Lakehouse and Environment, will also be set automatically.
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Deployment rule is supported to overwrite the default binding of default Lakehouse and Additional Lakehouse.
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By providing the Lakehouse ID, Lakehouse name, and the ID of the workspace where the Lakehouse is located, you can specify which Lakehouse should be set as the default in the target stage. You need to run the deployment after updating the deployment rule to make it effective.
To learn more about this, please refer to the documentation: Spark Job Definition deployment pipeline support.
Access control policies are established in OneLake security by specifying limiting factors for rows and columns in conjunction with tables during role definition. Spark uses these roles associated with the user executing the code and applies row and column data filtering accordingly before presenting the data to the user's code.
These enhancements offer greater flexibility, stronger compliance, and simplified access management across Fabric’s unified data ecosystem.
Key Improvements with Pylance
Smarter Auto-Completion moves beyond basic keyword and variable suggestions to context-aware completions, helping users quickly find relevant variable names and functions.
Before Pylance
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With Pylance
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Enhanced Lambda Expression Support: More accurate completions within inline lambda functions, improving readability and efficiency for functional programming.
Parameter Completions: Intelligent suggestions based on type hints and type inference, streamlining function calls.
Improved Hover Information: More detailed insights when hovering over variables and code elements.
Better Docstring Rendering: Clearer formatting and presentation of documentation strings for better readability.
Error Markers & Semantic Highlighting: Improved error detection and code visualization, making debugging more intuitive.
With Pylance in Fabric Notebook, writing Python and PySpark code is faster, more accurate, and more efficient.
To learn more about Pylance in Notebook: Develop, execute, and manage Microsoft Fabric notebooks.
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This feature provides flexibility in managing Environment permissions. Workspace viewers can use the Environment for running jobs without access to edit contents, while roles above workspace viewer can update the contents. To ensure only authorized users can access or update Environments, you can now manage Environments in one workspace, grant access to different users with different roles, or share the Environment with others with Read/Reshare/Edit permissions.
Note that using an Environment from a different workspace does not break the compute and security configurations set by the admins.
When you attach an environment from another workspace, both workspaces must have the same capacity and network security settings. Although you can select environments from workspaces with different capacities or network security settings, the session will fail to start. Furthermore, the compute configuration in that environment is ignored. Instead, the pool and compute configurations will default to the settings of your current workspace.
To learn more about across attaching Environments: Create, configure, and use an environment in Fabric.
Now, Shortcuts are automatically exported as JSON metadata to the git repository connected to the workspaces. Also, you can modify Shortcut properties directly in git using your favourite authoring tool and import changes directly to the workspace. The Fabric Deployment pipelines work as expected, Shortcuts are now deployed across the stages defined in the pipeline configuration.
This is the first step, on the upcoming releases, we will incrementally add support to additional object types under the Lakehouse, such as Folders, Tables, Views and more.
Find out more information about the feature in the Lakehouse deployment pipelines and git integration documentation.
You can use your functions to perform data engineering tasks such as data validation or data cleaning, create integrations with external systems, or create re-usable function libraries.
Learn more about this feature in the Fabric User Data Functions documentation.
Link to YouTube video
In this update, we added features that will help you make the best of your functions from the comfort of your browser.
Portal editor
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You can now create, modify, delete or edit your functions directly in your browser. This experience gives you powerful tools to add to your functions code with the convenience of using the Fabric website portal. The editor features Intellisense and Pylance functionality to help you write quality Python code, as well as common editing functionality such as edit history, find and replace, and more.
Insert code samples
One of the most convenient features in the portal editor is the Insert Samples function that allows you to input code to quickly get started developing common use case patterns such as reading and writing to a Fabric data source, performing data transformations, and more.
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Add your favorite PyPI libraries!
Another new feature is the Library management experience, which allows you to use the browser to add PyPI libraries into your project. Think of this as your requirements.txt file. You can select the library from a dropdown menu of names and choose a version that best suits your needs. The versions will be filtered to the ones compatible with the supported Python environment.
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New use cases and data sources!
User Data Functions are deeply integrated with the Fabric ecosystem. You can now invoke your functions from different kinds of Fabric items such as Fabric notebooks, Power BI reports and Data pipelines. In addition to this, you can connect to Fabric data sources such as warehouses, lakehouses, SQL Databases, and Mirrored Databases for all your data applications.
Learn more about this feature in the Fabric User Data Functions documentation.
FSCK is designed to safely remove missing parquet files from the Delta transaction log, to restore table read consistency. This is not data recovery functionality, the missing parquet files and the data contained in it are lost. The command removes the references so the table can be back to a readable state. The command can also be run with a DRY RUN evaluation mode and will list all files that are missing in storage but still referenced by the Delta transaction log, to help you assess issues with the table before moving forward.
Delta Lake’s OPTIMIZE VORDER can now be run with idempotency, meaning that previously V-Ordered parquet files that are already within the target file size won’t be considered for bin compaction. This significantly improves the performance of the OPTIMIZE command. Enable it by setting parquet.vorder.fast.optimize.enabled to true in the Spark session configuration directly on Notebooks, Spark Jobs or using Environments.
Find more information in the Fabric Runtime 1.3 (GA) documentation.
To improve the developer experience, monitoring APIs for Fabric Spark applications are essential for optimizing performance, debugging issues, and ensuring efficient workload management. These APIs enable customers to automate Spark job management and monitor Spark jobs programmatically using APIs and SDKs.
Key Capabilities of Fabric Spark Monitoring APIs
With these APIs, users can:Stay tuned for further enhancements as we continue refining these APIs based on customer feedback!
With NotebookUtils, you can now seamlessly access and invoke UDFs directly from your Notebook code, making it easier than ever to integrate reusable functions into your data processing and analysis.
Key Features & Scenarios
Here’s how you can take advantage of UDFs within your Notebooks:
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Invoking a Function
This integration is available for Python, PySpark, Scala, and R, making it accessible across various data science and engineering workflows.
For more details, check out our documentation: NotebookUtils (former MSSparkUtils) for Fabric.
https://youtu.be/ktqKB4Bj1LQ?si=KPJ83e5D_jN8jbGF
We’ve also added a new interaction modal for Copilot, on-cell and quick actions. The Copilot in Notebooks on-cell and quick actions introduces powerful features designed to streamline and enhance the coding workflow. The On-Cell Copilot Button, conveniently positioned above each notebook cell, allows users to perform advanced data manipulation tasks such as pivoting tables, joining datasets, and aggregating data based on specific criteria.
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Additionally, the Quick Actions Button, located just below the cell, simplifies tedious tasks using AI, such as fixing code errors and adding code comments.
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These features not only improve the efficiency of coding tasks but also enhance the overall user experience by providing intuitive and accessible tools directly within the notebook environment. With these enhancements, users can achieve more accurate and efficient results, making their coding process smoother and more productive.
By combining Fabric’s sophisticated data analysis over enterprise data with Azure AI Foundry’s cutting-edge GenAI technology, businesses can create custom conversational AI agents leveraging domain expertise. This seamless integration enables organizations to develop agents that are not only based on unstructured data in Azure AI Search or SharePoint but also integrate with structured and semantic data in Microsoft OneLake, thereby enhancing data-driven decision-making.
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With the Fabric data agent Python SDK, users can automate workflows and reduce manual effort. Users can seamlessly create, update, and delete Fabric data agent artifacts, optimize resource configurations, and gain valuable insights from their data. To get started, users can leverage the comprehensive documentation and sample code provided with the SDK. By automating experimentation and validation processes, the
Fabric data agent Python SDK ensures that developers can efficiently meet customer needs and deliver high-quality solutions, making it an invaluable tool for working with data agents.
INSTALL the Fabric data agent.
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Figure 1: A few examples of AI functions usage.
Refer to the detailed blog Functions in Data Warehouse to learn more and sign up for preview.
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Refer to the detailed blog Functions in Data Warehouse to learn more and sign up for preview.
Scalar SQL User-Defined Functions (UDFs) are a cornerstone of T-SQL programming, widely recognized and utilized for their ability to encapsulate business rules and calculations into a reusable code. This feature offers an efficient solution for promoting code modularity across T-SQL queries while natively leveraging Fabric Warehouse distributed engine.
In an example below, by using four (4) different functions we can easily apply data masking logic on our customer table.
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Refer to the detailed blog Functions in Data Warehouse to learn more and sign up for preview.
The COLLATE clause in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse and the SQL Analytics Endpoint of Lakehouse (LH) is essential for managing text-based data processing, ensuring accurate sorting, filtering, and comparisons. Given that Warehouse, SQL Analytics Endpoint of LH and other items support variations of case-insensitive and case-sensitive configurations, collation settings provide users with precise control over text handling in their workloads. By explicitly defining collation for VARCHAR and CHAR fields in table definitions, schema modifications, and queries, users can ensure consistency across transformations. The support for DATABASE_DEFAULT collation further simplifies schema management, allowing tables to inherit database-level settings for ease of administration and alignment with organizational standards.
The collation feature in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse and SQL Analytics Endpoint is enhanced with IntelliSense and syntax highlighting, providing a more intuitive and efficient development experience. IntelliSense offers real-time suggestions, validation for collation names, helping users avoid syntax errors and ensuring compatibility with supported collation settings. Syntax highlighting further improves readability by visually distinguishing collation clauses, making it easier to identify and manage collation settings in CREATE TABLE, ALTER TABLE, SELECT, and CTAS statements. These features streamline query development, reduce errors, and enhance productivity when working with case-sensitive and case-insensitive data configurations across Microsoft Fabric's SQL environments.
A few examples are:
CREATE TABLE [SampleData_CI_UTF8] (
[SampleID] INT NOT NULL, -- Unique identifier for each sample
[SampleValue] VARCHAR(50) COLLATE Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_KS_WS_SC_UTF8, -- Sample value with specified collation
[CreatedAt] DATETIME2(6) NOT NULL -- Timestamp for when the sample was created
);
CREATE TABLE [SampleData_DB_Default] (
[SampleID] INT NOT NULL, -- Unique identifier for each sample
[SampleValue] VARCHAR(50) COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT, -- Sample value with specified collation
[CreatedAt] DATETIME2(6) NOT NULL -- Timestamp for when the sample was created
);
INSERT INTO [SampleData_CI_UTF8] ([SampleID], [SampleValue], [CreatedAt])
VALUES (1, 'Sample1', GETDATE()), -- Inserting sample data
(2, 'Sample2', GETDATE());
INSERT INTO [SampleData_DB_Default] ([SampleID], [SampleValue], [CreatedAt])
VALUES (1, 'Sample1', GETDATE()), -- Inserting sample data
(2, 'Sample2', GETDATE());
-- Collate in Select
Select [SampleValue] COLLATE Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_KS_WS_SC_UTF8
from [SampleData_DB_Default]
Select [SampleValue] COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT
from [SampleData_CI_UTF8]
--Collate in CTAS
CREATE TABLE SampleDataCreate AS
Select [SampleValue] COLLATE Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_KS_WS_SC_UTF8 as SampleValue_CI_UTF8
from [SampleData_CI_UTF8]
CREATE TABLE SampleDataCreate AS
Select [SampleValue] COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT as SampleValue_CI_UTF8
from [SampleData_CI_UTF8]
-- Collate in ALTER Table Add New Column
ALTER TABLE SampleData_CI_UTF8
ADD Column4 VARCHAR(10) COLLATE Latin1_General_100_CI_AS_KS_WS_SC_UTF8 NULL;
ALTER TABLE SampleData_DB_Default
ADD Column4 VARCHAR(10) COLLATE DATABASE_DEFAULT NULL;
Live templates
Writing T-SQL queries efficiently is crucial for database developers. Live Templates are predefined code snippets that can be inserted into your T-SQL editor with minimal effort. They help reduce repetitive coding, enforce best practices, and improve developer productivity.
Key benefits:
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Expand and collapse objects properly in filter and search
We’re making search and filter experiences more intuitive! Now, objects that meet your search and filter criteria will automatically expand, giving you instant visibility into relevant data. Moving forward, we’ll expand only what’s required—keeping your object explorer clean and efficient unless no matches are found.
Artifact Status Bar
The Git item status bar component offers a comparable experience to the status bar in the workspace. When accessing the item page, you can view the details of the connection between the workspace and the Git repository, such as:
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Cancel query on closing editor
Handling long-running queries efficiently is crucial for a seamless warehouse experience. To improve user control, we’re introducing an enhanced query cancellation prompt that ensures users can make informed decisions when closing the editor while a query is still executing.
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1. Prompting users when closing an active query
If a user attempts to close the editor while a query is running, they will see a confirmation message:
‘Do you want to cancel the query?’
2. Customizing future prompts
When a user chooses Yes to cancel a query for the first time, they will see an additional prompt:
‘Do you want to see this message next time?’
Why this matters:
Navigating your data warehouse just got faster! Our keyboard shortcuts UI enhance efficiency across key areas:
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Why use keyboard shortcuts?
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Previously, tracking warehouse events manual effort making security audits and forensic investigations cumbersome. With native audit logging in Fabric Data Warehouse, organizations gain automated, tamper-resistant logging, simplifying security operations. Whether you need to investigate unauthorized access, analyze query execution trends, or ensure adherence to governance policies, SQL Audit Logs provide the transparency and control needed to safeguard your data.
By improving security, governance, and operational insights, these new capabilities help organizations maintain compliance while ensuring efficient data management.
What Permissions Can Be Assigned to Users?
When it comes to assigning permissions, it's important to understand the different types of permissions available and their implications. Here are some core and custom permissions that can be assigned to users:
Assigning permissions can be done through user interfaces on the share dialog:
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After you click on the option, we will be able to see the options surfaced on the dialog menu:
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You can also validate the permissions on the Manage Permissions option on the share menu:
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Item permissions are a fundamental aspect of data management, providing the necessary controls to secure, comply, and collaborate effectively. By understanding and implementing permissions like Monitor, Reshare, and Audit, organizations can enhance their data security posture and foster a collaborative environment.
With this release, organizations can now govern data at scale with a consistent, unified approach—whether you're implementing centralized security controls or need granular SQL-based permissions. OneLake Security empowers teams to secure, simplify, and scale access across your Lakehouse architecture.
Two Flexible Access Modes to Match Your Needs
OneLake Security introduces two distinct access modes for SQL Analytics Endpoints:
1. User Identity Mode
In this mode, the SQL Endpoint uses the signed-in user’s identity to access data in OneLake. It fully honors the RLS (Row Level Security), CLS (Column Level Security), and OLS (Object Level Security) rules defined in OneLake.
Great for: Organizations that want centralized control and alignment with data lake-level security.
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2. Delegated Identity Mode
Here, the SQL Endpoint uses the workspace or artifact owner's identity to connect to OneLake. This enables traditional SQL-based security management with full support for GRANT, custom roles, masking, and other advanced database security features.
Great for: SQL administrators and advanced use cases needing fine-grained SQL access control.
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User Identity x Delegated Mode
| Capability | User Identity Mode | Delegated Identity Mode |
| Access Context | Signed-in User | Datawarehouse Owner |
| OneLake RLS/CLS/OLS | Enforced | Not Enforced |
| SQL GRANT on Tables | Not Allowed | Allowed |
| SQL GRANT on Views/Procedures | Allowed | Allowed |
| Dynamic Data Masking | Not Supported | Supported |
| Custom SQL Roles | Not Supported | Supported |
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Let’s dive into the functionalities of each connector and explore how they can benefit your data processing needs.
Can’t find your data sources?
Let us know! Send us an email at askeventstreams@microsoft.com or fill out our survey.
Key benefits of leveraging CI/CD tools in Eventstream:
This feature ensures that your data is transmitted securely over a private network, allowing you to fully harness the power of real-time streaming and high-performance data processing in Eventstream. The diagram below shows a typical setup using MPE in Eventstream.
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Managed Private Endpoints are now available in even more regions, making it easier for organizations worldwide to build secure, scalable streaming solutions. The table below lists supported regions for Eventstream’s MPE:
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To learn more about Managed Private Endpoints, check out the Connect to Azure resources securely using MPE in Eventstream.
The screenshot demonstrates how this feature works in Eventstream’s Custom Endpoint!
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Additionally, if you’re using an Azure resource like Azure Logic Apps with a system-assigned or user-managed identity, you can now assign Fabric workspace permissions to that identity. This enables Azure Logic Apps to seamlessly connect to Eventstream using Managed Identity authentication.
The screenshot demonstrates how to enable identity in the Azure Logic Apps and assigning permission in the Fabric workspace.
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To learn more about Entra ID authentication in Eventstream’s Custom Endpoint, refer to our documentation Connect to Eventstream using Microsoft Entra ID authentication.
Why Data preview matters
The Data preview feature allows users to:
Using Data preview in Eventstream is simple:
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With Data preview, teams can build, test, and deploy Eventstream items faster and with greater confidence. Get started today and experience the power of real-time processing for your third-party connectors in Eventstream!
Data can be directly from:
Over the past few months, our team has been working tirelessly to bring new features to the Get Data wizard, creating a simpler interface, quicker navigation, and added automation, all aimed at delivering a better user experience and improved performance.
The main changes introduced:
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3. Automatic detection of header row for CSV files:
The Get Data wizard now seamlessly detects if a CSV has a header row and uses it for column names. The column data type is inferred based on the data in the remaining rows. This makes the process of schema definition, when your file has headers a painless process.
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What are Azure and Fabric Events?
Azure and Fabric Events offer a capability within Real-Time Intelligence that enables you to:
To learn more, please go to Azure and Fabric Events documentation and for the full announcement, refer to the announcement blog.
Now, OneLake Availability supports backfill, making all existing and new data in Eventhouse available, regardless of when you turn it ON. This is the default behavior when you enable availability via the UI.
Learn more about Eventhouse OneLake availability.
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To check out the new experience, open a Power BI report and select ‘Add Alert’ on a visual, or choose ‘Set Alert’ from the ribbon.
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Figure 2: The improved ‘Set Alert’ experience in Power BI makes it easier than ever to create and manage Activator alerts on your reports.
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Learn more about End-to-end sample.
The migration process is performed using Fabric REST API endpoints. The recommended steps for performing the migration are as follows:
https://youtu.be/pluk-b8XVj4?si=WYcsvCJG4SIhzaHf
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To learn more, refer to the documentation: What is a virtual network (VNet) data gateway?
Best-in-class connectivity and enterprise data movement
In the fast-evolving data integration landscape, Data Factory continues to enhance the existing connectors to provide a seamless, high-performance experience. With a focus on improving connector efficiency and expanding capabilities, recent updates have made significant advancements to Salesforce and Lakehouse connectors. These improvements not only boost performance but also enable more sophisticated data handling, ensuring that enterprises can extract, transform, and load data with greater accuracy and efficiency.
Performance improvement in Salesforce connector in data pipelines
Salesforce is a critical data source for many organizations, housing valuable customers and business data. To enhance data movement efficiency, Data Factory has introduced performance optimization in the Salesforce connector for pipelines. Optimization allows you to fetch the data concurrently from Salesforce by leveraging the parallelism capability, thus significantly reducing extraction times for large datasets.
Lakehouse connector now supports deletion vector and column mapping for delta tables in data pipelines
The Lakehouse connector in Data Factory has been upgraded to provide deeper integration with delta table. Two major new capabilities enhance data processing workflows:
1. Support for deletion of vector
Delta table uses deletion vectors to track deleted records efficiently without physically removing them from storage. With this new feature in the Lakehouse connector, users can:
Delta table's column mapping capability allows for more flexible schema evolution, ensuring that changes in table structure do not disrupt data workflows. With column mapping support in the Lakehouse connector, users can:
To learn more about how to Configure Lakehouse in a copy activity refer to our documentation.
This month we are happy to list the newly updated certified connectors that are part of the Microsoft Data Factory Connector Certification Program. Be sure to check the documentation for each of these connectors so you can see what’s new with each of them.
New connectors
Updated connectorsSince its preview last September, Copy Job has rapidly evolved with several powerful enhancements. Let’s dive into what’s new!
Public API & CICD support
Fabric Data Factory now offers a robust Public API to automate and manage Copy Job efficiently. Plus, with Git Integration and Deployment pipelines, you can leverage your own Git repositories in Azure DevOps or GitHub and seamlessly deploy Copy Job with Fabric’s built-in CI/CD workflows.
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VNET gateway support
Copy Job now supports the VNet data gateway in Preview! The VNet data gateway enables secure connections to data sources within your virtual network or behind firewalls. With this new capability, you can now execute Copy Job directly on the VNet data gateway, ensuring seamless and secure data movement.
Upsert to Azure SQL Database & overwrite to Fabric Lakehouse
By default, Copy Job appends data to ensure no changed data is lost. But now, you can also choose to upsert data directly into Azure SQL DB or SQL Server and overwrite data in Fabric Lakehouse tables. These options give you greater flexibility to tailor data ingestion to your specific needs.
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Enhanced usability & monitoring
We’ve made Copy Job even more intuitive based on your feedback, with the following enhancements:
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More connectors, more possibilities!
More source connections are now available, giving you greater flexibility for data ingestion with Copy Job. And we’re not stopping here—even more connectors are coming soon!
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What’s next?
We’re committed to continuously improving Copy Job to make data ingestion simpler, smarter, and faster. Stay tuned for even more enhancements!
Learn more about Copy Job in: What is Copy job in Data Factory
Learn more about Mirroring for Azure SQL Database from Microsoft Fabric Mirrored Databases from Azure SQL Database.
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To learn more, please reference the PostgreSQL mirroring preview blog.
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Dataflows in Microsoft Fabric now includes a ‘Save as’ feature in preview, that in a single click lets you save an existing dataflow Gen1, Gen2 or Gen2 (CI/CD) as a new Dataflow Gen2 (CI/CD) item.
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Incremental Refresh for Dataflow Gen2 allows you to refresh only the buckets of data that have changed, rather than reloading the entire dataset on every dataflow refresh. This not only saves time but also reduces resource consumption, making your data operations more efficient and cost-effective.
These new capabilities are designed to help you to be successful with your data integration needs and be as efficient as possible. Try it out today in your fabric workspace!
Learn more about Incremental Refresh in Dataflow Gen2: Incremental refresh in Dataflow Gen2.
What if you want to check the status of the validation? You now have a new entry point in the home tab of the ribbon called Check validation which you can click at any time to give you information of the ongoing validation or the result of a previous validation run.
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Be sure to give this a try whenever you want to check the results of a save validation.
What's New:
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Learn more about Apache Airflow job in Microsoft Fabric in What is Apache Airflow job?
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This exciting new improvement to pipeline triggers in Fabric Data Factory means that you can now automatically invoke your pipeline when files or folders have files that arrive, delete, or rename!
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We’ve previously supported Azure blob file events in Fabric Data Factory like ADF & Synapse but now that Fabric users are leveraging OneLake as the primary data hub, we’re excited to see the pipeline patterns that you’ll build using OneLake file triggers!
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With Variable Libraries, you can assign variables to unique values based on different environments, i.e. dev, test, prod. Then when you promote your factory to high environments, you can use different values from the library providing the ability to change values when pipelines are promoted to new environments.
This new preview feature will be super useful not just for CICD but also generically allows you to replace hardcoded values with variables anywhere in your pipelines to achieve the same functionality as global parameters in Azure Data Factory as well.
And we are excited to announce that parameterization is now supported in this activity!
You will find this update in the Advanced settings where you can configure your SJD parameters and run your Spark Job Definitions with the parameter values that you set, allowing you to override your SJD artifact configurations.
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Key Highlights
You can now utilize an additional 40 activities to build more complex pipelines for better error handling, branching, and other control flow capabilities.
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https://youtu.be/spe7ZMImHH0?si=uf7NmQ6CNp2iDJLO
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Check out our documentation on Dataflow Gen2 with CI/CD and Git integration to learn more.
Check out our documentation on CI/CD for Data pipelines and REST API capabilities for Data pipelines to learn more.
Learn more from CI/CD for mirrored databases.
The REST APIs support has been Generally Available including the SPN support. Check out our documentation on Mirroring Public REST APIs.
Check out our documentation on CI/CD for Copy job to learn more.
What are Parameterized Connections?
Parameterization of data connections in Data pipelines allows you to specify values for connection placeholders dynamically. This means you can pre-create data connections for various sources, such as Azure Blob Storage, SQL Server or any other data source supported by data pipelines, and reference them through data pipeline’s dynamic expressions at runtime. This feature empowers you to create more flexible and adaptable data pipelines, capable of connecting to different instances of data connections of the same type, such as SQL Server, without altering the pipeline definition.
Key benefits:
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During the pipeline run, dynamic expressions within the data pipelines specify values for the connection placeholders, enabling seamless integration with pre-created data connections. This innovation ensures that your data pipelines are not only more efficient but also highly customizable to meet your specific requirements.
We believe this new feature will significantly enhance your data processing capabilities and streamline your workflows. We can't wait for you to experience the benefits of parameterized connections in your data integration projects.
Major feedback that we’ve heard from our users is the lack of this capability in the Data destination experience for Dataflow Gen2. Thanks to the feedback, we’re now introducing the first support for parameters in the data destination experience where you can set a parameter to be used for the Table name of your destination.
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This is available to all destinations that support this field and we’re working on extending this support to other areas of the data destination experience. Try out this new capability and let us know what you think.
Check out the blog post on Efficiently build and maintain your Data pipelines with Copilot for Data Factory: new capabilities a... to learn more.
Effortlessly generate your data pipelines: Understand your business intent and effortlessly translate it into data pipeline activities to build your data integration solutions. In the enhanced capability of Copilot, we can easily build more complex Data pipeline activities e.g. switch activity, metadata driven pipeline, etc. You can also update your pipeline settings and configurations in batches with multiple activities!
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Efficiently troubleshoot error messages in your data pipeline Copilot. Diagnose and resolve pipeline errors more intuitively by providing clear and actionable summary.
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Easily understand your complex data pipelines: Understand your complex pipeline configurations effortlessly by getting a clear and intuitive summary provided by Copilot.
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Automate Data Ingestion with Osmos AI Data Wrangler for Microsoft Fabric
As enterprises scale AI adoption, they must ensure all their data is AI-ready. However, enterprise data is often messy - semi-structured or unstructured, arriving in inconsistent formats from customers, partners, suppliers, and internal systems. Traditional ETL pipelines require constant engineering effort to adapt to schema drift, missing fields, and poor data quality, slowing down AI and analytics initiatives.
Osmos AI Data Wrangler enables autonomous data transformation as a Workload on Microsoft Fabric. Osmos’ agentic AI automates data ingestion by intelligently cleaning, transforming, and validating your data, seamlessly normalizing messy bronze data into silver tables in your Lakehouse.
Get it now: Osmos AI Data Wrangler for Microsoft Fabric
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Osmos AI Data Wrangler is now generally available!
Osmos’ AI Data Wrangler is now generally available (GA), featuring self-configuration capabilities, featuring self-configuring Wrangler Context. This feature allows Wranglers to understand your business rules and apply it to data transformations. With the new Wrangler Context feature, businesses can auto-configure their Wranglers using existing documentation and code snippets, giving you easy-to-configure high performance data wranglers quickly.
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Why enterprises choose Osmos AI for data ingestion & transformation
Osmos helps businesses across retail, manufacturing, finance, and audit unlock millions in savings while accelerating insights and new market opportunities.
✔ Unify clean data into Lakehouse - Normalize disparate data coming from multiple internal and external sources into clean, actionable SQL-ready data.
✔ Improve data quality - AI-powered validation ensures structured, clean, and accurate data for analytics and decision-making.
✔ Streamline workflows - Eliminate manual data cleanup by enabling Wranglers to autonomously learn from documentation and business rules.
✔ Enhance AI & analytics readiness - Deliver trusted, structured data ready for AI-driven insights and enterprise analytics.
Check out the Osmos AI Data Wrangler with Wrangler Context video.
What’s Power Designer All About?
Power Designer is sleek, intuitive, and fun, making designing reports feel less like work and more like unleashing your inner artist. It’s packed with features that’ll have you saying, ‘Why didn’t I have this sooner?’
Get it now: Power Designer Workload.
Let’s dive into the magic:
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Ready, set, design! Let’s make some report magic happen!
Learn more at PowerBI.tips Designer
YouTube video: Introducing Power Designer: Unleash Your Inner Report Wizard!
Get it now: Profisee MDM Workload for Microsoft Fabric.
By embedding MDM capabilities directly into Microsoft Fabric, Profisee empowers organizations to:
For organizations leveraging AI and advanced analytics, having trusted, consumable (aka ‘gold medallion’) data is critical. Profisee’s deep integration with Microsoft Fabric ensures businesses can confidently rely on their data to make informed decisions and drive innovation.
This collaboration between Profisee and Microsoft represents a significant leap forward, enabling enterprises across industries to unlock insights, fuel opportunities, and finally bring their data into the age of AI to become data-driven at scale.
YouTube Video – Welcome to Profisee's featured workload in Microsoft Fabric
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Figure: Profisee enables your medallion architecture to deliver consumable, trusted data for AI and analytics.
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Figure: Profisee can match, merge and standardize data from different sources.
Get it now: Lumel PowerTables Workload.
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There are 3 key use cases for PowerTable:
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Unlike products like Airtable or Smartsheet, which typically struggle to handle more than tens or hundreds of thousands of rows, PowerTable is highly scalable and can support millions of rows. This is possible because our architecture separates the user interface from storage and compute and uses pushdown SQL statements to perform all processing on the underlying database of your choice.
Visit our website www.lumel.com to learn more.
PowerTables Introduction in action video.
Get it now: SAS Decision Builder workload.
There are numerous use cases across many industries, including financial services (loan approvals, financial products), manufacturing (product quality), and public sector (fraud identification, help with choosing a government service).
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Decision Flow in SAS Decision Builder
Key features:
Getting started:
Access SAS Decision Builder from the Workloads tab within your Microsoft Fabric instance. Select the SAS Decision Builder Workload Hub page, select ‘Add Workload,’ and transact through the Azure Marketplace process. Once complete, you can start building your decisions with SAS Decision Builder.
Get it now: SQL2Fabric-Mirroring
Embedded workload integration: Striim embeds directly into the Microsoft Fabric Workload Hub, ensuring real-time data movement orchestration without leaving the Microsoft Fabric environment. Enterprises can leverage this integration for cohesive data workflows and enhanced discoverability.
Real-Time data replication & streaming: Striim offers sub-second latency ingestion from SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Databricks. These structured pipelines optimize data for Azure OpenAI, Fabric Copilot, and Vector Search—delivering AI-ready insights.
Enterprise security & performance: With end-to-end encryption, access control, and high-throughput event streaming via change data capture (CDC), Striim ensures secure, scalable, and low-latency performance across hybrid environments.
Integrated workload with Fabric: Striim seamlessly embeds within the Microsoft Fabric Workload Hub, enabling enterprises to orchestrate and automate real-time data movement without leaving the Fabric ecosystem.
AI-Optimized streaming: Striim delivers structured data pipelines tailored for Azure OpenAI, Fabric Copilot, and Vector Search. It ensures fresh, AI-ready data for machine learning models.
Use cases
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