Cannot create Ontology in the official Ontology Tutorial

[apturlov]

Hi Community! Hope someone has figured that out. If not, hope this will raise an issue for the Fabric Ontology team to look at.

There is an official tutorial to try out Ontology in Fabric here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/iq/ontology/tutorial-0-introduction. There are 5 steps in this tutorial:

I am going through these steps but I am stuck on the step 1 - Create an Ontology. There are two paths in the tutorial - create Ontology from data, and create Ontology from a semantic model.

Path 1 - creating Ontology from Data is stuck when trying to bind data from the Lakehouse to entity properties or Preview Data. The UI shows the progress indicator for some time and then stops.

Behind the scene I see in the in-browser Developer Panel (Edge) that Fabric UI is trying to query the API but cannot complete the request:

The same getTableDetails request is issued and failed for both scenarios - when loading columns from the Lakehouse table or trying to preview the data.

As a result, the Ontology cannot read data from the Lakehouse and UI shows this message:

The data is perfectly fine in the Lakehouse, I uploaded it from the link in Step 0 of the tutorial:

Without binding data there is no way to continue with this tutorial. If you know what's wrong is going on here, please share.

Path 2 - creating Ontology from a semantic model is stuck when trying to configure relationships between SaleEvent entity and Store and Products entities. For some reason, the dialog cannot assign source columns from corresponding tables and the Create button never activates

Again, the UI shows a progress indicator in both "Select column" boxes but never completes. As in the previous scenario, behind the scene in the Developer Panel (using Edge) I see that the same API request fails in the SelectColumn UI dropdown:

This is a technical reason for this not working, but I have no clue for why that is happenning.

To avoid initial unnecessary questions, I have completed all prerequisites mentioned in Step 0 and in Required Tenant Settings, unless something else is necessary that is not documented. I have tried with both Trial subscription and Commercial F2 - the result is the same. Ontology cannot read data from the Lakehouse and cannot read columns from the tables. I have other Lakehouses in multiple workspaces that I also tried - Ontology cannot read from any Lakehouse, period.

Another issue, I noticed. In the instruction a Lakehouse fro this tutorial should be created without a schema:

If I follow this approach the Ontology cannot read the list of tables from the Lakehouse, so it's stuck even earlier. If I enable schemas in the Lakehouse the list of tables iavailable, but the data canot be read:

Hope, above is enough information for whoever wants to try and see if the tutorial can be completed. Let me know please, if you can spot anything wrong I am doing here.

[apturlov · Accepted solution]

Another update. Microsoft team discovered that the issue with not loading Lakehouse tables and columns was related to the Lakehouse API being inaccessible to the Ontology item. They are rolling up the update to fix that and it already started working in North American regions including Canada, but North Europe regions are a little behind.

Testing after the fix, I confirm that the official Ontology tutorial now works (tested in Canada and East US regions) but it only supports Lakehouse without a schema as a data source. An Ontology can be created from a Lakehouse with the schema enabled and data binding will work but the Graph instance that powers the Ontology preview will not work at all. So, for now, stick with the Lakehouse without a schema when using Ontology. It does look like a limitation, but there could be possible workarounds like Lakehouse table shortcuts, for example, which need to be tested. But it's another story.

I am closing this issue as the original problem seems to be resolved.

[apturlov]

To keep the community updated, this issue was raised with Microsoft support and Real-time intelligence team. The support tickets were created. The issue in my environment was confirmed during multiple Teams calls and independently by a few Fabric users including Microsoft employees. The initial assessment was that the problem likely exists in the APIs used by Ontology to query information from a Lakehouse. Since this is confirmed to be an internal Fabric problem, I don't expect the community to help with this, but feel free to follow along.

[apturlov]

There seem to be open issues with Fabric IQ here Microsoft Fabric Known Issues but none seem to be as severe as not being able to create an Ontology. The issue seems to be too obvious to be missed. I feel like something is missing in the settings but I cannot figure out what specifically. I am a Fabric admin and can configure everything.

[apturlov]

I mentioned above that I tried Lakehouse without a schema (as suggested in the tutorial) and also with the schema as I described above. When using a Lakehouse without a schema the Ontology creation is stuck earlier when trying to bind properties to tables: at the point when the source table should be selected. In this scenario the API calls behind the scene also fail but they are different calls:

So, none of the ways to create an Ontology in Fabric from a Lakehouse currently works 🙁