Power BI August 2026 Feature Summary
Welcome to the August 2026 Power BI Feature Summary! This month includes updates across reporting, modeling, data connectivity, mobile, embedded analytics, and developer experiences, with a mix of generally available enhancements and new preview capabilities. Let's take a look at what's new. Download Power BI Desktop Events and Announcements September 15 | What a Winning Power BI Dataviz Looks Like Meet the finalists headed to Barcelona to compete for the title of Power BI Dataviz World Champion. Explore the visuals that got them there, hear their tips for creating standout dataviz, and join their virtual cheer squad before they face the ultimate challenge: 20 minutes to create a championship-winning visual live on stage. Reserve your spot. Community Conference Tickets are Getting Low The European Microsoft Fabric and SQL Community Conference take place September 28 to October 1 in Barcelona, Spain, bringing together Microsoft experts and community leaders for exclusive content, live demos, and key announcements, along with more than 130 sessions spanning Fabric, Azure AI, Databases, Power BI, and Microsoft Purview. And of course, the live Dataviz World Championships finale! The most recent event in Atlanta sold out. Don’t miss out and register for the Barcelona event with code FABCMTY200 to save €200. General Deprecation of Old File Picker experience in Power BI Desktop In April we deprecated the old file picker experience in Power BI Desktop. Starting in October, users still utilize versions of Power BI desktop from March 2026 or earlier will no longer be able to save and share Power BI files to One Drive and SharePoint. Please ensure you update Power BI desktop to keep using this functionality. Note: No action is required from users as part of this deprecation; this is simply an informational announcement. Copilot and AI Updates to required semantic model permissions for Fabric Apps Currently, users need Build permission on the underlying semantic model to view and interact with a Fabric App created with the data app template. In early September, consumers will need only Read permission on the semantic model, along with access to the Fabric app. This change supports least-privilege of access by no longer requiring the broader Build permission for app consumption. App authors will still require Build permissions on the semantic model. Learn more about creating a Fabric app connected to a semantic model. Copilot Summary and Copilot Narrative can now read visuals hidden behind bookmarks Authors commonly use report bookmarks as tabs to organize content by showing and hiding visuals on a page. In these designs, certain visuals are hidden by default and revealed only when a display-only report bookmark is triggered. Copilot previously skipped these visuals entirely, so its Summary responses reflected only part of the report. Copilot Summary can now read and consider these bookmark-revealable visuals in its responses. This covers only visuals that are hidden by default and made visible by a display-only report bookmark triggered through a bookmark button or bookmark navigator. Authors can also select these hidden visuals when configuring the Copilot Narrative visual. Visuals are read in place with no changes to the bookmark state, and RLS and OLS permissions stay fully enforced. To learn more, refer to Summarize a report with Copilot and Create a narrative visual with Copilot for Power BI. Reporting Modern visual defaults and customize themes formatting panes (Generally Available) New reports created in Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service start with the Fluent 2 base theme, giving you a polished, consistent look without formatting each visual. Use the Theme pane to set the base theme, adjust colors to your brand or pick from one of the available color palettes, change text styles, set specific visual properties, page settings, and the filter pane look and feel across your entire report, and import or export custom theme, in both Desktop or web. Figure: Customizing a report’s base theme and color palette in the Power BI Theme pane. In this release, we also removed all font overrides from the base theme, so the Text section in the Theme pane now works as intended. Change a font in one place to update titles, callouts, labels, and general text across every visual in your report, including new visuals added later. For a deeper look at what's included, see the Deep dive into Modern Visual Defaults and Customizing Theme Improvements and Deep dive into modern visual defaults and formatting your entire report blog posts. Learn more about the base themes and the Theme pane in the Visual defaults in Power BI reports documentation. Date picker for Slicer visual (Generally Available) Date pickers combine relative selections that roll forward as time passes with a calendar and slider for manual date range or single date selection. You can anchor relative options to today, the first date, or the last date in your column. Figure: Enabling single-date selection for the Date picker slicer in the Selection controls settings. New in this release, the Single date setting under Visual > Slicer settings > Selection controls restrict the slicer to one date at a time—the calendar and slider allow only a single date, and the relative options are limited to selections that return a single date. And you can now clear selections from a header icon in addition to slicer header. For more information, see the Slicer visual in Power BI documentation. Center value for donut chart (Generally Available) Donut charts can now show value in the center, no overlaid card required. Enable the center value and the donut displays it right in the middle. You control the details in the formatting pane: value format, display units, and font. Add an optional label above or below the value, place an image above or below it, or change the background filling or image of the center. Need something other than the total? Add a custom measure to the center value in the formatting pane. Figure: A donut center can show a plain total or a custom value, label, image, or background to match your report. The center value stays in sync with your data: filtering, cross-highlighting, drill-down, and selecting a slice all update it automatically. And because it lives inside the visual, it stays aligned across resizing, mobile, and dashboards, and works with screen readers. To add a center value, select your donut chart, open the formatting pane, and turn on Center value. To learn more, refer to Add a center value to a donut chart. Comments support for reports in org apps Users can now collaborate on reports in org apps using comments. Comment on report pages and visuals, start discussions with colleagues, and use ‘@mentions’ to notify others and bring them into the conversation. Comments also capture the current report context, helping others understand exactly what you're seeing when providing feedback or discussing insights. Figure: Comments pane open on a report in an org app comment box highlighted. To learn more about, see comments in Power BI reports. Matrix: Expand and collapse for column headers (Generally Available) You can now expand and collapse column headers in the matrix visual, just like you already can for row headers. When your matrix has more than one field in the Columns field well, +/- icons appear on the column headers so you can combine groups or reveal more detail directly in the visual. You can also customize the color and size of the +/- icons under Column headers > +/- icons in the format pane. Figure: Customizing the color and size of expand and collapse icons for matrix column and row headers. To learn more, see Expand and collapse row and column headers. Matrix: Set the default freeze state for row headers in the format pane Report authors can now set the default freeze state for matrix row headers directly in the format pane. Turn the Row headers toggle on or off under Layout > Freeze to control whether row headers stay visible or scroll away when consumers scroll horizontally. This default is saved with the report and applies to everyone who views it. Figure: Setting the default freeze state for matrix row headers in the Visual formatting pane. This new setting is especially useful for mobile layouts. On phones, portrait orientation limits horizontal space, so you might want to unfreeze the row headers on your mobile layout to give data values more room, while keeping them frozen on the desktop layout, which typically uses landscape orientation. Figure: Setting the default freeze state for matrix row headers in a mobile layout. The right-click Freeze row headers and Unfreeze row headers options are still available and, as before, remain transient — they apply only to the current viewing session, so consumers can flip the state temporarily without changing the report author's default. To learn more, see Freeze row headers. OneLake file URLS for report visuals and maps (Generally Available) You can now use links to image files stored in OneLake as an image source anywhere where Power BI accepts an image URL. This works in the image visual, table and matrix cells, the card visual, button and list slicers, as well as for custom icons in the Icons cell element when you use the Field value format style. OneLake file links work even though they require authentication—Power BI signs in on your behalf when the report loads, so you don't have to make images anonymously accessible to use them in your report. Copy the file URL from OneLake and paste it into any image URL field or into a column or measure set as Image URL. Example: https://onelake.dfs.fabric.microsoft.com/{workspace-id}/{item-id}/Files/{path-to-image Figure: Using a OneLake file URL as the image source for an image visual in Power BI. Reference layer maps and shape map files can also be linked from OneLake file URLs. Keep your files in OneLake and use them in your Power BI reports today! For more information, see the Display images in a table, matrix, or slicer and Image visual in Power BI documentation. Outer padding for bar, column, line, ribbon, and waterfall charts in formatting pane (Generally Available) Column, bar, clustered, line, ribbon, and waterfall charts now include an Outer padding setting under Layout, giving you control over the space between the edges of the plot area and the first and last categories. This is helpful when you want your chart to fill the visual—especially in scenarios where you've turned off the category axis and are relying on a legend, like a clustered column chart used as a comparison view. Then, you can simply resize the visual to get the look you want on your report page. Reducing outer padding on line charts with categories also lets you show more data before a scrollbar appears. Figure: Adjusting outer padding and spacing between categories to control how charts fill the plot area. To use it, select the visual and, in the Format pane, expand Columns, Bars, or Lines > Layout, then set Outer padding to 0%. To fully fill the plot area, also set Space between categories to 0%. For more information, see the Customize x-axis and y-axis properties documentation. Azure map reference layer shape-matching improvements (Generally Available) Shape matching in Azure Maps reference layers now delivers significantly better performance. When you match your Power BI data to shapes in a reference layer—for example, joining sales data to a set of custom territories or regions in a GeoJSON file—reports now render faster, and interactions like filtering, cross-highlighting, and zoom respond more smoothly. No configuration change is required; existing reports automatically benefit from the improvements. Figure: Improved Azure Maps reference layer performance, with faster rendering shown in the Performance analyzer. For more information, see the Add a reference layer to the Azure Maps Power BI visual documentation. Azure map loads filtered selection and autozoom (Generally Available) The Azure Map visual has a 30,000 data point rendering limit, and previously, points beyond that limit didn't display—even when you filtered the report to focus on a smaller area whose data hadn't originally loaded. Now, when you filter to a smaller selection, the visual reloads to include the newly relevant data points that weren't part of the original 30,000. This means you can start with a broad view of your data and drill into any subset—by region, category, time period, or through cross-filtering—and be confident the map shows the complete picture for what you've filtered to, not just what fit in the initial load. Figure: Filtering the report to Washington reloads the relevant ZIP code shapes and automatically zooms the Azure Maps visual to the selected area. The Azure Map visual also now automatically zooms to fit the currently filtered area. When you or a report viewer applies filters, use slicers, or cross-filter from another visual, the map reframes to the extent of the visible data instead of staying at the original viewport. This keeps the map focused on the data being analyzed and removes the need to manually pan and zoom after every filter change. For more information on Azure Map, see the Azure Maps visual for Power BI documentation. Slicer visual dropdown border color, open icon, and hierarchy expand and collapse icon colors in formatting pane (Generally Available) Based on your feedback, we’ve added more slicer formatting options beyond the selection icon, giving you greater control over the slicer’s appearance. When you add more than one field to the slicer to have a hierarchy in vertical list or dropdown style, make sure the icon color matches your report. And dropdown style, offering a compact slicer to your report has more formatting options. Figure: Customizing the slicer dropdown border, open icon, and accent bar in the Visual formatting pane. The new top-level Dropdown section in the Visual formatting pane lets you customize the dropdown box in both its open and closed states, including border color (with conditional formatting), rounded corners, and the open icon color (with conditional formatting) and transparency. A new Accent bar option adds a color bar to the dropdown box with settings for color (with conditional formatting), position, transparency, and width. For hierarchy slicers, the top-level Hierarchy section lets you color the expand and collapse icons (with conditional formatting) and choose which icon to use. For more information, see the Slicer visual in Power BI documentation. Modeling More control over Semantic Model refresh in Power BI Service We've added new refresh options in Power BI Service to give you greater control over how semantic models are refreshed. Previously, selecting Refresh always performed a schema sync followed by a data refresh. While this works well in most scenarios, there are times when you may want to refresh data without updating the model schema or vice versa. For example, in Direct Lake semantic models, a Lakehouse table might have changed by adding new columns, but you may want to load the latest data without bringing those schema changes into the model. Figure: New model refresh options in Power BI Service Model view. The Refresh button now includes three options: Refresh schema and data: Updates the schema and then refreshes data. Sync schema only: Applies schema changes from the data source, such as new columns or data type changes. Refresh data only: Loads the latest data while preserving the current semantic model schema. In addition, refresh operations can now be performed at the table level. This allows you to refresh a specific table instead of the entire semantic model and choose whether to refresh its schema, data, or both. Figure: New table refresh options in Power BI Service Model explorer. These enhancements provide more flexibility and control over semantic model maintenance, helping you refresh exactly what you need while minimizing unnecessary changes and processing. Refer to the Data refresh in Power BI documentation for more information. Convert Direct Lake Tables to Import Storage Mode in Web Modeling (Preview) Direct Lake on OneLake supports composite models by allowing for mixing Direct Lake tables with Import and DirectQuery tables. You can now convert individual Direct Lake tables to Import storage mode directly in Power BI web modeling, giving you a seamless way to build a Direct Lake composite (mixed mode) semantic model. Open a Direct Lake on OneLake semantic model in web modeling, select one or multiple tables, and change the Storage mode from Direct Lake to Import in the Properties pane. The modeling flow guides you through configuring a connection and refreshing the table into Import mode. Because Direct Lake and Import tables support regular relationships, performance remains unchanged. Figure: Change the Storage mode property from Direct Lake to Import to convert a single table. A warning dialog will be surfaced before continuing. This feature will be rolling out over the next few weeks. Refer to the Direct Lake in web modeling documentation for more information. Direct Lake Calculated Columns (Preview) You can define calculated columns directly in your semantic model using DAX in web modeling and Power BI Desktop, without changing the table storage mode or modifying data upstream. Key behaviors Only the User Context expression context is supported. User-context-aware DAX functions such as USERCULTURE() are supported. Columns do not materialize and are evaluated at query time. Security context is respected (RLS and OLS). Columns cannot be used in relationships because they do not materialize. Expressions that do not reference user-aware functions or secured columns behave like any other DAX calculated column. Figure: Creating a concatenated location field. Figure: Month names displayed using USERCULTURE(). "Customer Location" returns the same value for every user unless the security context differs. "Month Name" adapts to the language of the person viewing the report. Figure: Month names are localized based on the user's culture using USERCULTURE(). No preview switch is required - open a Direct Lake on OneLake semantic model in the web or edit in Desktop, add a calculated column, and start authoring in DAX. To learn more, see the Create calculated columns in Power BI Desktop documentation. Data connectivity Accessibility, Dark Mode, and Usability Upgrades Theming improvements for better accessibility In this release, we’ve invested in a range of theming improvements that address color contrast and readability across both the light and dark themes. Users who rely on higher-contrast visuals will notice cleaner, more legible interface elements throughout the Power Query UI. Highlights: Improved color contrast across interface elements in both light and dark themes. More consistent theming that keeps controls, text, and icons clearly distinguishable. A stronger foundation for accessibility that benefits all users, regardless of theme preference. Figure: Better contrast for connectors and white background for icons. Better contrast for connector icons in Dark Mode Connector icons are how you quickly recognize your data sources, but in Dark Mode, icons with transparent backgrounds could blend into the surrounding UI and become hard to identify. We’ve fixed that. Now, when a connector icon has a transparent background, it automatically receives a white background in Dark Mode. The result: connector icons stand out clearly and stay easy to identify across the new Power Query UI, making it faster to find and select the right data source briefly. To learn more, refer to the Get data in Power BI Desktop documentation. Mobile Rotate view in the mobile report footer The Rotate view button is now available in the Power BI Mobile report footer, letting you switch layouts with one tap for larger visuals and a wider view—even when your phone is locked in portrait orientation. This is especially helpful for reports that don't have a mobile-optimized layout, which open in portrait by default. Just tap Rotate view to get a wider, more readable view, then tap again to switch back. This feature is rolling out soon to Power BI Mobile for iOS and Android - stay tuned! Figure: Tapping Rotate view in the report footer to get a larger view of the report. To learn more about the actions in the report footer, refer to the Explore reports in the Power BI mobile apps documentation. To learn how to build a mobile-optimized layout for your reports, see the mobile layout documentation. Export data to Excel in the Power BI mobile app Export data from Power BI report visuals directly from your phone or tablet. With Export data now available in the Power BI mobile app for iOS and Android, you can quickly take the data behind a visual into Excel for further analysis or sharing, without switching to the Power BI service on another device. To export, open a report visual in focus mode or open the visual’s More options (…) menu, and select Export data. The export starts automatically using the supported Excel format for that visual. The exported data reflects your current filters, slicers, drill state, permissions, and row-level security. When the file is ready, use your device’s sharing options to open, save, or share it. Figure: Exporting data from a report visual to Excel in the Power BI mobile app, via focus mode or open the visual’s More options (…) menu. To learn more, see Export data from a Power BI visualization. Embedded Analytics Enhancements to Power BI Embedding in SharePoint Online Embedding Power BI reports and report pages in SharePoint Online is now easier. With our new UI, you now have the option to directly select the workspace you want to embed in SharePoint, rather than copying and pasting the full URL. Simply navigate to SharePoint online, add Power BI content, and the new menu will allow you to browse workspaces and reports you have access to. Alongside embedding reports and report pages, you can now also embed a visual. Simply select the "Embed a single visual" toggle to select the specific visual you want to embed. Figure: Embedding a Power BI visual with the new SharePoint Online Experience. More details about these enhancements can be found in the Power BI and SharePoint Documentation. Developers + API’s Faster PBIP development with instant reloads and VS Code integration A faster PBIP editing experience is here. If you're working with Power BI Projects (PBIP), you can now edit project files outside Power BI Desktop and reload those changes instantly, without restarting the application. Power BI Desktop automatically detects changes made to your files and prompts you to apply them with a single click. Figure: Apply external changes prompt in Power BI Desktop. To make editing even easier, we've also added a built-in entry point that opens your project directly in Visual Studio Code. Figure: Open Visual Studio Code entry point in Power BI Desktop. Whether you're making edits in VS Code or using external tools to update your project files, you can now move seamlessly between your tools and Power BI Desktop without breaking your flow. Learn more Third party custom visuals Need more visual options for your report? Power BI reports support custom visuals built to fit your exact needs. Browse hundreds of options in AppSource, also available directly from Power BI Desktop, or develop your own and add it to a single report, share it across your organization, or publish it to AppSource for the community. You can even develop a custom visual tailored to your specific requirements with AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot Free. The following are some updates from the community-based custom visuals you can use in your reports today. PowerGantt Chart by Nova Silva The PowerGantt Chart helps teams plan, track, and communicate project timelines directly in Power BI. This month's update is shaped by your feedback, and we're grateful to the community of users whose suggestions keep guiding how the visual evolves. We've added three enhancements that give you finer control over how schedules and baselines are displayed. What's New? Baseline customization – Set the baseline bar size relative to the actual task bar and move milestone icons onto the baseline so planned versus actual delivery is easy to compare. Squared bar edges – Choose squared edges on item bars for a cleaner, more technical look. Vertical grouping – Group tasks vertically to organize large project structures by phase, team, or workstream. Whether you're managing product launches, construction schedules, or multi-team programs, these refinements make complex timelines easier to read briefly. Project managers, PMOs, and analysts gain sharper baseline comparisons, cleaner layouts, and better navigation across busy projects. Try the PowerGantt Chart for FREE now on your own project data by downloading it from the AppSource. Questions or remarks? Visit us at: NovaSilva. Slicer Panel by Powerviz Powerviz Slicer Panel is an advanced, all-in-one slicer that combines lists, dropdowns, sliders, buttons, date pickers, switches, and text slicers in one panel. With built-in templates, full customization, and import/export, it makes filtering smarter, simpler, and more interactive. Key Features Multiple Slicers in One Build: Bring together a wide variety of slicer types, including dropdown, expanded list, date, button, text, slider, and switch slicers, all within a single, unified panel, to filter your entire report from one place. Display Mode: Switch between Canvas, Pop-up, and Pop-up by Slicer. Orientation & Position: Arrange slicers and dock the panel top, bottom, left, or right. Panel Header: Show slicer icon, text, applied count, search, clear, and saved slicers. Slicer Action Icons: Edit, expand/collapse, sort, clear, rank, duplicate, or delete each slicer. Add Tabs: Group slicers into tabs for organized filtering. Saved Slicer: Store filter selections as reusable states. Conditional Formatting: Style slicer values with rule-based formatting. Advanced Search: Search across slicers and fields instantly. Other features included Templates, Import/ Export Themes, Search within Slicer, Ranking, Sorting, and more. Try Slicer Panel visual for FREE from App Source Check out all features of the visual Step-by-step instructions YouTube Video Learn more about visuals Follow Powerviz on LinkedIn Figure: From multiple slicer types to display modes, orientation, and saved slicers, every feature is designed to make your filtering more flexible, interactive, and effortless. Drill Down Map PRO by ZoomCharts When visualizing data with geographic coordinates, what better way to do it than literally placing it on a map? That’s why map charts are a growingly popular visualization type in Power BI reports, and the Drill Down Map PRO custom visual by ZoomCharts expands on the capabilities of map charts. Node Clustering: Multiple nearby nodes can create clusters and even display the values as pie charts. Simply zoom in to drill down. Base Layer Customization: Choose between AzureMaps or any custom tileserver, use your own images as the base layer, or disable it entirely. Custom Shape Layers: Enable up to 10 individually customizable shape layers. Use preset shapes or import your own KML/GeoJSON files. Conditional Formatting: Automatically apply color fill to each area by comparing their values against other shapes or by using each shape’s own reference value. And More: Paginated tooltips, custom tooltip fields, auras, node images, lasso tool. Figure: Reveal deeper insights with clustering, pie charts, custom shape layers, and flexible base map options tailored to your reporting needs. Figure: Customize every aspect of your map with conditional formatting, node images, auras, advanced tooltips, and intuitive selection tools. Drill Down Map PRO works incredibly well with other visuals by dynamically cross-filtering data, enabling you to build even more insightful and user-friendly Power BI reports. Get Drill Down Map PRO on AppSource Closing That's a wrap for the August 2026 Power BI Feature Summary. This month's release includes improvements across reporting, modeling, data connectivity, mobile experiences, embedded analytics, and developer workflows, along with continued investments in Copilot, accessibility, and Direct Lake capabilities. We hope these updates help you build, manage, and share data experiences more effectively. As always, we appreciate your feedback and look forward to hearing how you're using these features in your organization.
Fabric Data Agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio (Generally Available)
Organizations can now bring governed business data from Microsoft Fabric into Copilot Studio agents, enabling agents to answer questions, generate insights, and support business processes using trusted enterprise data. Fabric data agents make it easier to ground experiences in the data your organization already relies on. Since we announced this integration in preview, both Fabric and Copilot Studio have evolved significantly. General availability provides a more integrated experience, broader publishing options, and a stronger foundation for deploying data-powered agents across the Microsoft ecosystem. Fabric Data Agents are now integrated as tools Previously, you added a Fabric data agent from the Agents category as a connected agent. Now, Fabric data agents integrate through the new tool-based experience in Copilot Studio. Simply select Add a tool, search for Fabric, and select Fabric IQ Data MCP. Your Copilot Studio agent can then invoke the Fabric data agent the same way it calls any other tool. The orchestrator decides when to reach for enterprise data and when to rely on its other knowledge sources and tools. The Fabric data agent continues to execute in Fabric, respect permissions on underlying data sources, and return answers grounded in governed enterprise data. The benefit is a more composable architecture. A Fabric data agent becomes one capability among the connectors, workflows, and other tools available to your Copilot Studio agent. You can combine multiple Fabric data agents with other business systems to create richer, more capable solutions. Built on the new Copilot Studio experience and runtime Copilot Studio introduced a redesigned authoring surface and runtime powered by the GitHub Copilot harness. You can build, test, evaluate, publish, and monitor agents from a unified environment while using natural language to describe agent behavior and capabilities. For Fabric customers, the biggest benefit is improved orchestration. The harness uses an improved reasoning model that is better at deciding which tool to call and how to combine what comes back, which matters when a Fabric data agent sits next to SharePoint knowledge, connectors, and other tools in the same agent. You choose the harness when you create the agent. Agents built with the standard harness remain fully supported. Instead of building isolated data experiences, organizations can create agents that reason across multiple sources of enterprise knowledge while using Fabric as their trusted data foundation. Publish to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot Another improvement since preview is broader reach. You can now publish your Copilot Studio agent to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, bringing governed, data-grounded experiences directly into the tools people use every day. For example, a business user can ask about last quarter's regional performance in Microsoft 365 Copilot and get an answer from governed Fabric data without leaving the conversation they are already in. As always, permissions continue to apply. Users must have access to the Fabric data agent and its underlying data sources. d GIF - Add Fabric data agent as a tool to your Copilot Studio Agent. Why this matters The rise of AI agents is creating a new challenge for organizations: how to ensure agents are grounded in trusted business data rather than disconnected information sources. Fabric and Copilot Studio solve different parts of that challenge. Fabric provides the intelligence layer. It is where organizations bring together, govern, and publish data expertise through data agents. Copilot Studio provides the orchestration layer. It is where organizations build agents, workflows, and business processes that put that expertise to work inside a broader business process. Adding a Fabric data agent means everything you compose there can reason over governed enterprise data. Now, Fabric data agents and Copilot Studio (Generally Available) makes it easier than ever to bring governed data, business context, and intelligent action together in a single agent experience. Together, they enable organizations to: Build multi-agent solutions. Fabric data agent supplies the analysis while other agents and tools carry the rest of the process, such as drafting the document, updating the system of record, or routing an approval. Bring data together with everything else your agent knows. A Copilot Studio agent can pull a number from Fabric and a policy from SharePoint in the same answer. Meet users where they work. Publish to Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot so business users get data-grounded answers in the flow of their work. Keep one definition of your data. Fabric data agent stays the single source of truth for every Copilot Studio agent that consumes it, so answers do not drift between teams. Build it once in Fabric and reuse it across departments. Getting started Getting started with Fabric data agent integration with Copilot Studio (Generally Available) is easy: Build and publish a Fabric data agent with a clear, detailed description. Create or open an agent in Copilot Studio. Under Tools, select Add a tool, search for Fabric, and add Fabric IQ Data MCP. Test your agent in Preview. Publish to Microsoft Teams or Microsoft 365 Copilot. To learn more, refer to the Add a Fabric data agent as a tool in Microsoft Copilot Studio documentation for the full setup, and join the community discussion to share feedback and report issues.Fabric August 2026 Feature Summary
Welcome to the August 2026 Fabric update! Microsoft Fabric continues to evolve with new capabilities that help organizations build, manage, and scale their data and AI solutions more efficiently. This month's updates introduce enhancements across Fabric Platform, OneLake, Data Engineering, Conversational Analytics, Data Warehouse, Real-Time Intelligence, and Data Factory. Whether you're strengthening governance, improving performance, streamlining development workflows, or expanding AI-powered experiences, these updates are designed to help you get more value from your data while simplifying day-to-day operations. Explore the following highlights to see what's new in Microsoft Fabric this month. Events and Announcements Join us for FABCON and SQLCON in Barcelona, September 28 – October 1, 2026 Explore what’s possible with Microsoft Fabric and get up to speed on the latest in SQL, analytics, and AI. From 130 sessions and 4 keynotes to workshops, the expo, community spaces, and the Power BI DataViz World Championships, this is where the data community comes together. Learn directly from Microsoft and community experts shaping the future of Fabric and SQL. Register now and save €200 with code FABCMTY200. Fabric Platform KQL-Dashboard Embed in Fabric (Preview) A new capability that lets you add interactive KQL-Dashboard content directly into your own browser-based web applications is available. Now, you can bring Fabric analytics into the apps, portals, and workflows your users already use. Analytics are most useful when they are available where decisions happen. With Fabric Embed, you can place Fabric content inside a custom application or internal portal instead of requiring users to switch to the Fabric portal. Fabric Embed can help you: Bring interactive analytics into an existing business workflow. Explore Fabric analytics without switching between your application and the Fabric portal. Keep Fabric workspace permissions and Microsoft Entra ID identities at the center of access control. Build user-based embedded experiences for people who already have access to the underlying Fabric item. The embedded experience complements the Fabric portal. Content owners can continue to create and manage analytics in Fabric while application developers present that content in the context most useful to their users. To learn more, refer to the Microsoft Fabric Embed documentation. Git Integration – Workspace Relation API (Preview) Following our recent announcement of branch workspaces and the relationship that’s automatically created when a user performs a branch-out operation, we’re introducing the new Workspace Relations API. These endpoints let you create, query, update, and delete relationships between Fabric workspaces programmatically — and for anyone building automation around Git integration, branched workspaces, and CI/CD, it’s a big deal! The workflow is straightforward. A developer creates a feature branch. An ADO pipeline or GitHub Action then provisions a new feature workspace, configures Git, applies the right settings and permissions, and synchronizes the workspace. Finally, the Workspace Relations API links that feature workspace back to its parent — closing the loop and giving your automation a first-class, queryable connection between parent and branched workspaces. Figure: Branch workspace relation. To learn more, refer to Development process using Branch-Out experience. Git Integration and Deployment Pipeline – Item level permission restriction Starting December 1, 2026, users without read-write permissions on workspace items can't use Git integration and won’t be able to deploy a workspace or assign workspace to a stage via Deployment Pipeline. This restriction can result in loss of access to certain items because of sensitivity labels and protection policies applied to those items. To learn more, refer to Information Protection in Microsoft Fabric. OneLake Resource instance rules for OneLake (Generally Available) Resource instance rules for OneLake are ready for production workloads across enterprise analytics environments. They give workspace admins a precise way to allow access from trusted Azure resource instances while continuing to enforce network and data-level protections. Use resource instance rules when you need to enable secure service-to-service access to OneLake without relying solely on IP allowlists or requiring private networking for every integration. Combined with Private Link, IP firewall rules, and identity-based permissions, they help organizations apply layered security based on the needs of each workspace and workload. Resource instance rules support a broad set of Azure services that can present a verifiable Azure resource identity, including Azure Databricks, Azure SQL Server, Azure Data Factory, Azure Event Grid, Azure Machine Learning, and more. Configuration requires only the Azure resource ID, simplifying setup while maintaining control over which Azure resources can access OneLake. To learn more, refer to Manage inbound access to OneLake with Resource Instance Rules. Data Engineering Native Execution Engine performance improvements This month, we continued to improve the Native Execution Engine (NEE) with a new set of query execution optimizations designed to accelerate Spark workloads while reducing compute consumption. Key enhancements include broadcast joining reuse across queries, native acceleration for ranking window functions such as RANK and DENSE_RANK, and automatic materialization of reused Common Table Expressions (CTEs). Together, these optimizations eliminate redundant computation, keep more processing within the engine's vectorized execution path, and improve performance for common data engineering patterns including large joins, analytical reporting, ranking workloads, and complex transformation pipelines. Because these improvements are enabled automatically when NEE is available, customers benefit from faster execution times, lower Fabric capacity consumption, and improved price-performance without requiring code changes to existing notebooks, Spark Job Definitions, or pipelines. These optimizations are enabled by default once the Native Execution Engine is turned on, allowing customers to realize performance gains immediately without additional configuration or tuning. Customers can enable NEE at the workspace environment level by navigating to Environment > Acceleration and turning on Native Execution Engine, ensuring it is available for all Spark sessions using that environment. It can also be enabled at the session level by setting spark.native.enabled=true in Spark configuration. With NEE enabled, customers can seamlessly take advantage of the latest runtime innovations to process data faster, improve resource efficiency, and maximize the value of their Fabric capacity investments. To learn more about Native Execution Engine explore our documentation Native execution engine for Fabric Data Engineering. Fabric Runtime 2.0 (Generally Available) As the execution foundation for Microsoft Fabric's Data Engineering and Data Science experiences, Runtime 2.0 delivers a modern, high-performance platform built on Apache Spark and deeply integrated across the Fabric ecosystem. Purpose-built for large-scale data processing and analytics workloads, Runtime 2.0 represents a major advancement in performance, reliability, security, and future readiness. Built on the latest open-source innovations, it enables customers to accelerate data processing, simplify operations, and take advantage of the newest capabilities across Microsoft Fabric. This release includes significant platform upgrades, including Apache Spark 4.1, Delta Lake 4.2, Python 3.13, Java 21, Scala 2.13, and Azure Linux 3.0, providing a modern and enterprise-ready foundation for the next generation of data engineering, data science, and analytics workloads. These enhancements enable customers to take advantage of the latest open-source innovations while continuing to benefit from a fully managed, enterprise-grade experience in Microsoft Fabric. Whether you're building data pipelines, developing AI and machine learning solutions, processing streaming workloads, or powering enterprise analytics, Runtime 2.0 provides a more capable, scalable, and performant platform for your workloads. With improved performance, updated open-source foundations, and continued investment in capabilities such as the Native Execution Engine, Runtime 2.0 provides a modern platform for data engineering, data science, and analytics workloads in Microsoft Fabric. Explore the full documentation and start using Runtime 2.0 in production Runtime 2.0 in Fabric. Enhanced Spark Properties Support in Notebook and Spark Job Definition Notebook and Spark Job Definition (SJD) activities now enable users to specify Spark properties directly within the data integration pipeline. This enhancement allows Spark properties to be set inside the activity panel, ensuring that the values provided are used for activity execution. If an Environment item is linked to the Notebook or SJD and both the activity panel and Environment item define the same property, the value specified in the activity panel will take precedence and overwrite the Environment value. In the case of Notebooks, if the %%configure command is used within the notebook code to set a Spark property, the value set using %%configure will be applied for execution. This update offers users maximum flexibility, allowing Spark properties to be defined at different layers based on their specific use cases. By supporting property configuration in the activity panel, Environment item, and notebook code, users can tailor property values to meet the unique requirements of each execution of Notebook/SJD. To learn more on Transform data by running notebook and Transform data by running a Spark Job Definition activity. Conversational Analytics Enhanced Data Agent Visualizations with Fabric Visuals The data agent now uses Fabric visuals to render the charts it returns, bringing higher-quality, more consistent visualizations into your conversations with your data. When you ask a question like "Generate a bar chart of revenue by region" or "Show me my top 10 customers by sales," the data agent responds with an interactive, polished visual alongside its text and table answers, so you can spot trends, comparisons, and outliers. Because the data agent now shares the same visual foundation as Fabric Apps, charts look and behave consistently with AI-generated visuals in Fabric, with refinements to formatting, legends, tooltips, and axis scaling. Supported chart types include line, bar, stacked bar, pie, scatter, and area charts. To learn more, refer to the Get visual responses from a Fabric data agent documentation. Advanced DAX Generation for Semantic Models in Data Agents Advanced DAX generation for Power BI semantic models is now available in Fabric data agents when you use the Preview runtime. Instead of generating a DAX query in a single pass, the new system works iteratively as a specialized sub-agent that can use tools, inspect results, and refine its approach across multiple steps, providing significant improvements in response accuracy. It also uses instance value indexing to resolve values from the semantic model before generating a query, resulting in more accurate and reliable filters. This update is built on the same semantic-model query engine used across Fabric Skills, Power BI, and M365 Copilot, providing more consistent answers across Microsoft experiences. To use the new experience, open the Runtime dropdown in the data agent ribbon and switch from Standard to Preview. More improvements for semantic models in data agents are coming soon, including data source description and instructions, granular schema selection, and example queries. In the Preview runtime, the data agent uses advanced DAX generation to answer a question over a connected semantic model, enabling more accurate DAX generation and responses. To learn more, refer to the Semantic model best practices for data agent documentation. Data Agent orchestrator upgraded to GPT 5.1 The data agent orchestrator now runs on GPT-5.1, across both the standard and preview runtimes. The orchestrator handles how questions are rephrased, how work is planned across your data sources, and how the final answer is composed — so this upgrade changes behavior in all three. Most of what you see should be an improvement in answer quality and planning, but the change is not behavior-neutral: prompts tuned against the previous model may produce different results. We recommend re-running your evaluations, reviewing the results against your saved baselines, and updating your agent instructions and prompts where the new behavior doesn't match what your scripts expect. To learn more, refer to the data agent runtimes documentation. Example Query Usability Improvements in Data Agent We've made several usability improvements, for example queries. Errors now surface inline, directly alongside the query, so you can identify and correct issues without leaving the editor. The editor also resizes automatically based on the length of your query, removing the need to adjust the pane manually as you write. To learn more, refer to the example queries in data agent documentation. Add Schema Descriptions for SQL Sources in Data Agent Users can now provide tailored schema descriptions through the new schema description editor, available for SQL sources on the Preview runtime. Schema descriptions improve query generation and accuracy by giving the agent more context about what everything in your data means — use them to resolve ambiguous columns, or to give a table or field a more precise meaning than its name conveys. Instead of inferring intent from column names alone, the agent works from what your data team documented, so it selects the right tables and interprets fields the way you intended. To learn more, refer to the schema descriptions documentation. Data Agent is migrating from Assistants API to Responses API The OpenAI Assistants API that powers the orchestration layer for the Microsoft Fabric data agent, is currently scheduled to be shut down by OpenAI on August 26, 2026. After that date, direct calls to the Assistants API will stop working. If you connect to a Fabric data agent programmatically through the Assistants API, you need to migrate to the data agent Model Context Protocol (MCP) endpoint. SDK and Fabric portal users require little or no action because Microsoft will migrate those experiences internally, although conversation history may reset once. Existing agent data sources, instructions, and tools remain unchanged. To learn more, refer to Prepare your Fabric Data Agent integrations for Assistants API retirement. Fabric Data Agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio (Generally Available) Now, you can bring governed business data from Microsoft Fabric into Copilot Studio agents, so those agents can answer questions and support business processes using trusted enterprise data. Since preview, the integration has moved to the new tool-based experience: select Add a tool, search for Fabric, and add Fabric IQ Data MCP, and your agent can call the Fabric data agent like any other tool. The Fabric data agent still runs in Fabric and respects permissions on the underlying data sources. You can also publish your agent to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot, so business users get data-grounded answers where they already work. To learn more, refer to the Fabric Data Agent MCS GitHub documentation for setup steps and join the community discussion to share feedback. Fabric data agents in Microsoft Foundry: Easier to connect, easier to trust Fabric data agents in Microsoft Foundry are now easier to connect and easier to monitor. The integration moves to Model Context Protocol, so your Fabric data agents appear as tools that Foundry agents can invoke when they need enterprise data in OneLake. Connecting them no longer means hunting for workspace and artifact IDs. You add the Fabric IQ (OneLake Catalog) tool, filter for data agents, and pick the ones you want by name. You can also connect more than one Fabric data agent to a single Foundry agent, so an agent can draw on a sales agent, a supply chain agent, and a customer support agent and choose the right one for the question. On the operations side, you can now view logs and traces for Fabric data agents through Foundry Observability. Traces show which tools were invoked, how long each step took, and what came back, which makes it much easier to troubleshoot an answer that looks wrong or a workflow that runs slow. This is the visibility teams need to move agents from experiments to production. The update is rolling out to all regions over the coming days. Add Fabric data agent as part of Fabric IQ to your Foundry agent. To learn more, refer to the Observability for Fabric data agents in Microsoft Foundry documentation. Add co-publishers for data agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot When you publish a Fabric data agent to Microsoft 365 Copilot, the Microsoft 365 agent platform registers the agent and records you as its only owner. That created a problem for teams. Your co-creators could still edit the data agent in Fabric, but when they tried to republish it, the operation failed, because Microsoft 365 only lets registered owners publish. Fabric access and Microsoft 365 ownership are two separate lists, so giving someone edit rights in Fabric was never enough. Now, you can avoid this with co-publishers. After you publish the data agent, open Settings, go to the Publishing pane, and add your Fabric co-creators under Microsoft 365 Copilot co-publishers. Each person you add is registered as a co-owner on the Microsoft 365 agent platform, so anyone on that list can republish the agent. Add co-publishers right after your first publish so no one hits a failure in the meantime. Publishing pane in the Fabric data agent settings, showing where you add Microsoft 365 co-publishers. To learn more, refer to the Consume a data agent from Microsoft 365 Copilot (preview) documentation. Data Warehouse Identity columns with identity insert (Generally Available) Since preview, thousands of customers have adopted IDENTITY to auto-generate surrogate keys and streamline migrations from SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, and Azure Synapse. Now we're introducing support for IDENTITY_INSERT and reseed operations - two highly needed additions - so you can insert explicit key values, migrate data in bulk with COPY INTO, and safely realign identity ranges with DBCC CHECKIDENT. Figure: Using identity insert on Fabric Data Warehouse. IDENTITY columns are available now in every Fabric Data Warehouse. To learn more, check our updated tutorial and documentation. CI/CD 2.0 with DacFx (Preview) Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse is introducing a major update to the DacFx engine that powers schema comparison, Git integration, and deployment pipelines. DacFx builds a declarative model of your warehouse and determines the schema changes required to move safely between development, test, and production environments. Git-integrated CI/CD workflow for Microsoft Fabric, showing feature workspace synchronization, branch merging, and deployment pipeline promotion across development, test, and production workspaces. With this update, Git integration uses DacFx-based incremental extraction to produce cleaner, more focused commits. Deployment pipelines also use the updated model to generate more accurate comparisons and smarter deployment plans, with settings tuned for schema evolution. The new warehouse item definition version 2.0 updates the SQL project SDK, moves shared queries into a .sharedqueries folder, adds project-level Git configuration, and re-extracts object definitions to support constraints, identity columns, clustering, and consistent formatting. These changes make future commits easier to review and reduce noisy diffs. For more information, refer to the Upgrade Fabric Data Warehouse System File Version in a Git Integrated Fabric workspace documentation. Microsoft Fabric source control notification prompting users to apply the latest Warehouse system update, with a warning that the update will introduce differences between the workspace and its connected Git repository. The update also improves comparison accuracy. Git-connected workspaces can adopt the update when ready through the System update available experience, giving teams control over upgrade timing. Review and commit the generated changes before continuing normal development and deployment workflows. To learn more, refer to the Development and Deployment Overview documentation. Simplify Fabric Warehouse deployments with Schema Compare in VS Code Database deployments should not feel like a guessing game. With Schema Compare in Visual Studio Code, developers can see exactly what changed before those changes reach a Fabric Warehouse—bringing clarity and control to every release. Compare a Fabric Warehouse with another warehouse or a SQL database project, then review differences across tables, views, stored procedures, functions, and other database objects in a clear, object-by-object view. Choose the changes you want, update the project from the warehouse, or deploy selected changes to the target—without manually assembling and reviewing every deployment script. By keeping database projects synchronized in Git, teams gain a reliable source of truth and can bring schema changes into familiar pull-request and CI/CD workflows. The result is a safer, more intentional path from development to production, with fewer surprises at deployment time. Before applying changes, review the generated script for unsupported operations and potential data loss. To learn more, refer to the Develop warehouse projects in Visual Studio Code and Schema Compare in the MSSQL extension documentation. GPU Query Acceleration (Preview) Query Acceleration brings GPU-powered performance directly to Fabric Data Warehouse, enabling eligible analytical queries to run faster without query rewrites, special syntax, or additional systems to manage. Query Acceleration in Fabric Data Warehouse uses GPUs to accelerate the most compute-intensive portions of analytical queries, helping overcome the limits of CPU-only execution. It works transparently with existing T-SQL, Direct Query reports, applications, and tools, automatically offloading eligible operations such as scans, filters, joins, and aggregations to GPUs while the CPU continues to manage the rest of the execution pipeline. Customers can use Query Insights, Data Warehouse Monitoring, and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) for query execution plans to identify accelerated queries and understand how Query Acceleration is applied during query execution. Designed for analytical and high-concurrency workloads, Query Acceleration can improve throughput, reduce query latency, and deliver more consistent performance for dashboards and interactive analytics. Acceleration is applied selectively, enabling performance gains even when only part of a query is eligible for GPU execution. The capability is built with reliability in mind. Unsupported operations or runtime constraints can seamlessly fall back to CPU execution without affecting query correctness. Performance improvements depend on workload characteristics, but Microsoft benchmarks have demonstrated gains of up to 7× across reporting, application, and AI-driven analytics scenarios. Query Acceleration builds on Microsoft's Tensor Query Processor research, described in CoddSpeed: Hardware Accelerated Query Processing in Microsoft Fabric, which was selected as the SIGMOD Companion 2026 Best Industry Paper. To sign up for the Preview, please fill out the form. Metadata Sync supports Delta Checkpoint V2 (Generally Available) Metadata Sync (MD Sync) now supports Delta Checkpoint V2, enabling synchronization of modern Delta tables across both MD Sync (Legacy) and MD Sync (New). Delta Checkpoint V2 is a Delta Lake enhancement designed to improve scalability for large tables through a more efficient checkpoint structure. Previously, tables using Checkpoint V2 couldn't be synchronized and were reported as unsupported. With this release, MD Sync can discover and synchronize Delta tables that use the Checkpoint V2 format. This enhancement helps customers: Synchronize Delta tables that use Checkpoint V2. Improve interoperability with Spark, Databricks, and other Delta-based platforms. Support metadata synchronization for large-scale Delta tables more efficiently. Continue using existing checkpoint formats without any changes. MD Sync support for Delta Checkpoint V2 is available in both MD Sync (Legacy) and MD Sync (New), helping ensure consistent access to Delta tables across Fabric experiences. Secure data ingestion with COPY INTO and Workspace Identity (Generally Available) COPY INTO in Fabric Data Warehouse now supports Workspace Identity, enabling users to load approved data from OneLake or ADLS Gen2 without requiring direct access to the source files. Previously, ingestion users often needed permissions to both the target warehouse and the source storage location, or teams relied on SAS tokens, account keys, or service principals. With this release, source access can be centrally assigned to the workspace identity, while users retain only the SQL permissions required to load data into the target table. Key Capabilities: Load approved data without granting users direct access to raw storage. Use managed identity-based authentication for OneLake and ADLS Gen2 sources. Reduce reliance on SAS tokens, shared keys, and service principal secrets. Maintain separate authorization boundaries for source access and target-table permissions. Support least-privilege ingestion and separation of duties between storage and warehouse administrators. Workspace Identity support for COPY INTO is generally available in Fabric Data Warehouse, providing a simpler and more governed approach to secure data ingestion. To learn more, refer to the Ingest Data into Your Warehouse Using the COPY Statement and COPY INTO (Transact-SQL) documentation. SQL Audit Logs: More Signal, Less Noise with Predicate Filtering (Generally Available) SQL Audit Logs in Fabric Data Warehouse and SQL Analytics Endpoint now support identity-based predicate exclusion filtering, enabling administrators to reduce repetitive audit events generated by selected users and service principals. Previously, expected activity from automation identities, scheduled processes, metadata synchronization jobs, and other operational actors could create significant audit noise. With this release, administrators can configure exclusions through the API or SQL Audit Logs user experience, while activity from identities that do not match the exclusion predicate continues to be audited normally. Key Capabilities: Reduce repetitive audit events from known users and service principals. Focus investigations on higher-value and unexpected activity. Lower the storage, processing, export, and query burden associated with low-value events. Manage identity exclusions through either automated APIs or the user experience. Apply a governed audit policy aligned with organizational monitoring and compliance requirements. Identity-based predicate exclusion filtering is generally available for SQL Audit Logs in Fabric Data Warehouse and SQL Analytics Endpoint, providing a cleaner audit stream, less operational overhead, and more focused investigations. To learn more, refer to the SQL Audit Logs in Fabric Data Warehouse documentation. OneLake security improvements for SQL analytics endpoints (Generally Available) OneLake Security for SQL analytics endpoints now includes improvements for nested groups, shortcut-backed tables, column-level security, and service principals, enabling more consistent enforcement of OneLake security policies across enterprise Fabric environments. Previously, limitations with group expansion, shortcut scenarios, and service principal ownership could make centralized security difficult to apply at scale. With these improvements, customers can define security at the source lakehouse and rely on the SQL analytics endpoint to honor those policies across producer and consumer workspaces. Key Capabilities: Manage access through nested Microsoft Entra group hierarchies. Honor source-side OneLake Security policies for shortcut-backed tables in hub-and-spoke architectures. Apply column-level security consistently when users receive access through groups. Use service principals for automated deployments, pipelines, and application-owned data products, including service principal-owned lakehouses. Define security once in OneLake and reduce the need to duplicate permissions across consumer workspaces and Fabric engines. These OneLake Security improvements help make security synchronization more practical for enterprise architectures while providing consistent access control across lakehouses and SQL analytics endpoints. Microsoft is also continuing to improve security sync notifications, error handling, and permission propagation across Fabric experiences. To learn more, refer to the OneLake Security for SQL analytics endpoints documentation. Real-Time Intelligence Set Alerts Directly from Anomaly Detector (Generally Available) Detecting anomalies becomes more valuable if you can act on them. Previously, after publishing an anomaly detector configuration, you had to leave Anomaly Detector and navigate to Real-Time Hub to create an alert. This added extra steps and interrupted your workflow right after completing your configuration. With this update, you can now create alerts directly from Anomaly Detector. Once you publish a configuration, use the Set alert button in the ribbon to launch the alert creation pane without leaving Anomaly detector. If your configuration hasn't been published yet, you'll be guided through publishing first and then taken directly to the alert setup experience. This helps you move seamlessly from configuring anomaly detection to monitoring it in production. The integrated experience allows you to monitor your anomalies on each event, helping you get notified as soon as anomalies are detected. If you have more complex business logic, select on each event when to add in additional logic to your conditions. Whether you're monitoring operational metrics, business KPIs, or real-time telemetry, you can now complete the entire workflow in one place and start acting on detected anomalies faster with fewer clicks. Create alerts directly from your anomaly detector configuration and continue your workflow without navigating to another experience. Configure notifications for anomaly detector events directly within Anomaly Detector and start monitoring your published configuration immediately. Anomaly detector supports Eventhouse shortcut tables Anomaly Detector now supports Eventhouse shortcut tables, making it possible to analyze data without first copying or moving it into a dedicated Eventhouse table. You can create anomaly detectors directly on supported shortcut tables and use the same analysis, model recommendations, and continuous monitoring experiences available for native Eventhouse data sources. This expands anomaly detection to a broader range of data already connected through Eventhouse shortcuts, helping teams monitor external and federated data sources with less setup and duplication. By enabling anomaly detection directly on shortcut tables, you can move more quickly from connecting data to detecting issues, while continuing to work within a unified Real-Time Intelligence experience. To learn more, refer to the Anomaly Detection in Real-Time Intelligence documentation. Operations Agent Activity Log Understanding what your agent is doing and why is key to building trust and improving outcomes. The activity log is designed to provide that transparency. It gives you a clear view into the agent’s behavior, including the conditions it evaluated, the recommendations it generated, and how those recommendations were handled. Whether you are validating results, troubleshooting unexpected behavior, or refining your configuration, the activity log helps you better understand how decisions are being made. You can access the activity log from the Activity log section in the side navigation. It presents a chronological timeline of events with timestamps and relevant context for each entry. Selecting any event allows you to explore additional details and understand what happened at each step. In the Operation details page, you can view the operation details and status. To learn more, refer to the Create and Configure Operations Agents documentation. Eventstream MQTT connector (Generally Available) It is now easier than ever to ingest real-time data from MQTT brokers directly into Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence. MQTT is one of the most widely adopted messaging protocols for lightweight, low-bandwidth event driven messaging scenarios. Eventstream MQTT connector simplifies the ingestion of operational and IoT data into Microsoft Fabric, helping organizations turn real-time device events into actionable insights. Key Benefits: Connect to any MQTT broker and ingest messages directly into Fabric Eventstream. Production-ready reliability and support with General Availability readiness. Enterprise-grade security with support for TLS, mutual TLS (mTLS), and custom certificate authorities managed through Azure Key Vault. Private network connectivity through Eventstream's streaming connector virtual network capabilities, enabling secure access to brokers hosted in private and on-premises environments. To learn more, refer to the Add MQTT source to an eventstream documentation. Reference data enrichment in Eventstream (Preview) Eventstream now enables you to enrich real-time event streams with contextual business data using Reference Data Join. Simply add a Reference Data node to your Eventstream, select a Delta table from a Fabric Lakehouse, and use it to enrich streaming events with lookup, metadata, or reference information. You can also leverage Lakehouse shortcuts to access Delta tables across OneLake, making it easy to bring contextual data from anywhere in your Fabric environment into your real-time processing pipelines. Reference Data Join supports both no-code and SQL-based enrichment experiences. Use the built-in Join operator to visually configure INNER and LEFT OUTER joins or use the SQL operator for advanced scenarios. Select only the columns you need from the reference dataset and configure optional refresh intervals to keep slowly changing reference data up to date. This enables Eventstream to continuously use the latest lookup information for real-time enrichment, without requiring additional data movement or downstream processing pipelines. You can easily add multiple reference data sources to a single Eventstream and combine them with streaming data to create richer, more contextual event pipelines. Developers and data engineers can test and validate join conditions, preview join results, and verify SQL-based enrichment queries before deploying them into production, helping ensure accuracy and confidence in real-time data processing workflows. Reference Data Join unlocks powerful real-time enrichment scenarios in Eventstream. Users can enrich IoT telemetry with device metadata, correlate operational events with customer and product information, perform lookups against business reference datasets, and add contextual information to streaming data in flight. By bringing reference data and event processing together in a single experience, Eventstream enables customers to transform raw events into actionable business insights in real time. To learn more, refer to the Reference data join in Eventstream using Lakehouse documentation. Eventstream observability in Workspace Monitoring re-enabled with per-Eventstream control (Preview) Eventstream observability in Workspace Monitoring is back — now with granular control over which Eventstreams emit monitoring data. A new ‘Log Eventstream activity’ toggle in Eventstream Settings lets you enable or disable observability per Eventstream, so you can balance monitoring coverage with capacity consumption. When enabled, your Eventstream emits performance metrics, error counts, and health status to three tables in your Workspace Monitoring Eventhouse: EventStreamMetrics: throughput, backlog, and watermark delay EventStreamErrorMetrics: deserialization, conversion, and runtime error counts EventStreamNodeStatus: node health (Running / Failed) The toggle defaults to OFF for all Eventstreams. To get started, open any Eventstream, go to Settings, and turn on Log Eventstream activity. Your monitoring data will appear in the Workspace Monitoring database within minutes. Eventstream activity" within Monitoring. The panel highlights an active toggle switch, a description explaining that enabling this feature emits performance and error metrics to a monitoring database. To learn more, refer to the Monitor Eventstream data flows in Workspace Monitoring documentation. Eventstream UI editor improvements (Preview) We've redesigned key parts of the Eventstream editor to make building and troubleshooting faster and more intuitive. Always Publish: No more blocked publish buttons. Publish your work at any stage, the editor gives you clear, contextual guidance on what still needs attention instead of preventing you from moving forward. Inline error indicators: Errors now appear directly on the node that needs fixing, with actionable guidance on click. No more hunting through a detached error list to find what's broken. Operator and destination descriptions: Each option now includes an inline description explaining what it does, so you can build confidently without switching to docs. These changes reduce friction during authoring and make it easier to go from idea to running your pipelines. Secure Azure Event Hubs Connections in Eventstream with Workspace Identity (Preview) Bringing real time event data into Microsoft Fabric is now simpler and more secure with Azure Event Hubs integration for Eventstream. Organizations can connect Event Hubs directly to Eventstream and start routing event data to destinations such as Eventhouse for analytics and operational insights. A key capability is Workspace Identity, which removes the need to manage shared access keys. Instead, Eventstream can authenticate to Azure Event Hubs using the Fabric workspace identity. Administrators simply grant the workspace the Azure Event Hubs Data Receiver role, enabling secure access through Microsoft Entra based permissions. This approach improves security, simplifies credential management, and aligns with enterprise governance requirements. The integration supports both public and private network deployments. For Event Hubs hosted in private networks, organizations can connect through a streaming virtual network gateway while continuing to use Workspace Identity for authentication. For advanced event processing scenarios, users can enable schema support, associate schemas from the event schema registry, and route structured events to destinations such as Eventhouse. Combined with Workspace Identity, this provides a secure and scalable foundation for building real time data pipelines without the operational overhead of managing secrets or credentials. Schema Registry and Event SchemaSet Region Availability Previously, Schema Registry feature and the Event SchemaSet artifact was available for preview in 31 regions. Expanded to 10 additional regions: Geography Region Americas Central US Americas Mexico Central Americas West US 3 Europe Italy North Europe Poland Central Europe Spain Central Europe West Europe Asia Pacific Australia Southeast Asia Pacific Israel Central Asia Pacific Japan West If you were previously blocked from trying SchemaSets and schema-based Eventstream data ingestion, you can now do so in these regions. For more information on Event SchemaSets and how you can create and manage them, visit Schema Registry Overview. To learn more about configuring Eventstreams with schema-based sources, visit Use schemas in Eventstreams. Data-driven styling and UX improvements for Maps (Generally Available) Maps become most valuable when they help users understand not just where things are, but what the data means. Now, Data-Driven Styling, along with Markers Rotate by Data, Traffic Flow visualization, additional Map View options, and an improved Layer Settings experience. Together, these enhancements help organizations transform raw geospatial data into intuitive, actionable business insights. Let Your Data Tell the Story Understanding patterns hidden within geographic data can be challenging when every feature on a map looks the same. With Data-Driven Styling, Fabric Maps enables map builders to visually represent business data directly on the map, helping viewers quickly identify trends, hotspots, and outliers without inspecting individual records. The new Color by Value Range capability allows authors to style map layers using numeric measures such as revenue, utilization, sensor readings, environmental measurements, or operational KPIs. Instead of applying a single color to an entire layer, Fabric Maps visualizes value distributions chromatically, making important differences immediately visible. Organizations can choose between two visualization approaches: Gradient Styling uses continuous color transitions to reveal magnitude, trends, and geographic variation across a dataset. Step-Based Styling allows users to define custom value ranges with distinct colors, making it easy to visualize business thresholds, risk levels, performance bands, or service categories. To make these visualizations easier to interpret, Fabric Maps automatically generates corresponding data legends that explain how colors map to underlying values. This helps viewers understand the meaning behind the visualization and make decisions with greater confidence. Fabric Maps also includes thoughtfully designed color palettes, including options that support colorblind-friendly visualization scenarios, helping more users accurately interpret map-based insights. Combined with clear, automatically generated legends, these capabilities improve accessibility and make data-driven maps easier to understand across a wider range of audiences. per street and road and high-value exposure in flood-prone areas. Visualize Direction and Movement with Markers Rotate by Data Many operational scenarios involve not only location but also direction. Fabric Maps now supports Markers Rotate by Data, allowing marker symbols to automatically rotate based on values stored in a data column. This capability is available for Marker layers, enabling builders to visualize directional information directly on the map. Whether visualizing aircraft headings, vehicle movements, equipment orientation, or other operational workflows, map authors can represent direction without requiring custom visualization development. By transforming static points into directional indicators, organizations can add valuable operational context and communicate movement patterns more effectively. Add Real-World Context with Traffic Flow Visualization Location data alone doesn't always tell the full story. Fabric Maps now supports Traffic Flow overlays, allowing map builders to bring current traffic conditions into their existing map experiences. By combining business data with real-world traffic information, organizations can gain additional situational awareness for logistics operations, field service planning, transportation monitoring, and operational decision-making. The added context helps users better understand the environment surrounding their assets and activities without leaving the map experience. Configure the Right Map View for Your Audience Organizations often create maps for users across different regions and business contexts. Fabric Maps introduces additional Map View settings that allow map builders to configure how geographic information is presented, helping ensure maps are displayed in a way that aligns with organizational needs and audience expectations. This flexibility gives authors greater control over creating a consistent and intuitive viewing experience across a variety of business scenarios. A More Discoverable Authoring Experience UX research and user feedback showed that some key layer settings were difficult to discover. We updated the experience by moving geometry and visualization options—including visual type, Data-Driven Styling, and marker rotation—higher in the configuration pane. We also renamed General to Visibility, making the settings clearer and map authoring more intuitive. Turn Location Data into Business Insight Data-Driven Styling, built-in data legends, Markers Rotate by Data, Traffic Flow overlays, enhanced Map View options, and the improved Layer Settings experience help organizations transform location data into meaningful business insight. Together, these capabilities make it easier to uncover patterns, understand operational context, and communicate geospatial insights across teams. Start building with these capabilities today: explore the customization options, apply them to your own geospatial data, and create map experiences that turn location into action. To learn more, refer to the Customize a map in Microsoft Fabric documentation. Workspace Outbound Access Protection (OAP) for Operations Agent (Preview) Workspace Outbound Access Protection (OAP) in Microsoft Fabric helps admins secure outbound connections from workspace items to external resources. Admins can control outbound access by blocking unwanted connections by default and allowing only approved connections through configured rules. As organizations adopt AI-powered operations at scale, governance and security remain critical requirements. With this preview release, Microsoft Fabric introduces Outbound Access Protection (OAP) for Operations Agent, enabling workspace administrators to control the outbound actions an agent can perform. OAP applies workspace-level policies to actions such as Teams notifications, workflow triggers, and cross-workspace operations, helping organizations enforce security and compliance requirements while continuing to benefit from AI-driven automation. When OAP is enabled, Operations Agent continues to perform core functions including reasoning, recommendation generation, rule evaluation, and telemetry collection. However, outbound actions are governed by the workspace's configured access policies. Administrators gain greater visibility through in-product notifications, Teams messaging experiences, and the Operations Agent Activity Log, making it easier to identify and troubleshoot blocked actions What's new with Operations Agent and OAP? Govern outbound agent actions through workspace-level OAP policies. Control whether Operations Agent can send Teams notifications based on allowed connections. Prevent unauthorized cross-workspace actions when OAP policies restrict outbound access. Receive clear visibility when actions are blocked through in-product notifications and Teams messaging experiences. Monitor agent activity and OAP-related outcomes through the Operations Agent Activity Log. During the preview, some limitations apply. Cross-workspace actions are blocked when OAP is enabled. For example, Power Automate actions are not yet supported when OAP is applied, and only connectors that explicitly support OAP policies can be permitted. By extending Fabric's outbound governance framework to Operations Agent, organizations can adopt AI-powered operational automation with greater confidence while maintaining control over how and where agent-initiated actions are executed. Resources Workspace outbound access protection for operations agent (preview) Workspace Outbound Access Protection (OAP) Workspace Outbound Access Protection for Operations Agents Configure and manage Activator rules directly in Eventstream (Generally Available) You can now create and manage rules directly in Eventstream. Previously, setting up an alert required switching from Eventstream to Activator. While powerful, this meant moving between experiences to complete a single workflow. Now, alert creation is embedded directly into Eventstream. Capabilities for building or editing your Eventstream: Select the stream you want to monitor. Choose Set Alert. Define your condition (thresholds, aggregations, patterns). Configure the action. Create the rule. Capabilities for Activator destination created on Eventstream: Select Activator node Select Rule icon Create the rule Once you have the rule(s) created on your Eventstream, you can manage them by editing, deleting or opening in Activator. To learn more, refer to the Add a Fabric activator destination to an eventstream documentation. Data Factory Introducing Hierarchical Navigation in Monitoring Hub for Fabric Pipelines Modern data estates rarely consist of a single job running in isolation. Pipelines trigger notebooks, notebooks invoke other workloads, and business processes span multiple interconnected executions. When troubleshooting a failure or understanding lineage, customers often need visibility into how these executions relate to one another. Hierarchical Navigation in Monitoring Hub, is a new capability that helps you understand the relationships between runs and quickly navigate across upstream and downstream executions. With Hierarchical Navigation enabled, Monitoring Hub can display: Upstream runs that initiated a workload Downstream runs triggered by a workload Execution relationships across supported Fabric artifacts This provides a richer observability experience by helping you move beyond individual run monitoring and understand how your workloads operate together. This enhancement is another step toward a richer observability experience in Fabric, helping customers gain deeper insight into workload execution and dependencies at scale. To learn more, refer to the Hierarchical Navigation for Pipelines in Monitoring Hub documentation. Explore the modern Fabric Pipeline canvas (Preview) The new Fabric Pipeline canvas experience is designed to make pipeline authoring easier than ever. Key capabilities with modern canvas: Better visibility when navigating large pipeline graphs Cleaner, more structured layouts for complex orchestration logic Improved responsiveness when working with enterprise-scale workflows A more intuitive experience for pipelines with many activities and branches The modern Fabric Pipeline canvas, showing the updated node experience and option to disable the preview if needed. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the perfect time. The new experience is rolled out automatically and can be disabled at any time. Whether you're building your first pipeline or managing hundreds of activities across complex workflows, the new canvas is designed to help you stay productive and focused on what matters most. To learn more, refer to the Modern Pipeline Node Experience documentation. Upgrade Dataflow Gen1 to Dataflow Gen2 (CI/CD) using the Upgrade Wizard (Preview) The Dataflows Upgrade Wizard is a guided, end-to-end experience that upgrades your existing Power BI Dataflow Gen1 items to Dataflow Gen2 (CI/CD) in Microsoft Fabric with minimal effort. You can upgrade a single dataflow, or several dataflows from a workspace in a single flow. Previously, bringing a Gen1 dataflow into Fabric meant recreating it and repointing everything that depended on it. The Upgrade Wizard upgrades in place instead. Each dataflow keeps its ID, name, schedule, and connections, so the reports and semantic models that connect to it keep working without any changes. Before anything changes, the wizard assesses every dataflow in the workspace and tells you which ones need attention and why, such as incremental refresh settings to reconfigure or a linked entity to update, so you know what to expect before you upgrade. Why this matters Upgrade in place, with nothing to rebuild and nothing to repoint. Upgrade a whole workspace at once instead of one dataflow at a time. See what needs attention before you upgrade. Unlock Dataflow Gen2 innovations: improved performance, deeper Fabric integration, CI/CD and Git support, data destinations of your choice, richer diagnostics, Copilot-assisted authoring, and a modern data transformation foundation. The wizard is available for Dataflow Gen1 items in Premium or Fabric workspaces and requires Fabric to be enabled. To learn more, refer to the Upgrade Dataflow Gen1 to Dataflow Gen2 (CI/CD) using the Upgrade Wizard documentation. Extended watermark support in Copy job Watermark-based incremental load support enables Copy Job to efficiently ingest only new or changed data from key enterprise and SaaS data sources, avoiding costly full reloads. This reduces source-system impact, network traffic, and runtime while improving scalability for production analytics workloads. Customers can now use incremental loading across more of their critical data sources, including Salesforce, Informix, Cassandra, Greenplum, Presto, and Databricks, by leveraging Copy job’s built-in watermark mechanism and without building custom ingestion logic. To learn more, refer to the Incremental copy in Copy job documentation. Enable Change data feed during Lakehouse table creation in Copy job Copy job can now create Lakehouse tables with Change Data Feed (CDF) enabled automatically. There’s no longer a need to pre-create destination tables or manually configure Delta table properties. Simply select Enable CDF on destination and Copy job takes care of the setup for you. This ensures the table is immediately ready for incremental processing and downstream CDC scenarios, helping reduce data movement and improve replication efficiency. By eliminating manual configuration steps, it makes advanced data integration patterns much easier to adopt and operate at scale. To learn more, refer to the Automatic table creation and truncation on destination documentation. Amazon Redshift as new source in Copy job As part of our mission to enable multi-cloud data movement at petabyte scale with Copy job, we are bringing Amazon Redshift support as a source. This enables customers to seamlessly ingest data from one of AWS's most widely adopted data warehouse platforms directly into Fabric. Redshift support further strengthens Fabric's vision of delivering an open, connected, and multi-cloud data platform. To learn more, refer to the Connectors for Copy Job documentation. Copy job supports timestamps without time zone in Lakehouse Support for timestamps without time zones (timestamp_ntz) allows Fabric Lakehouse tables to preserve date and time values exactly as stored, without applying time zone conversions. Copy job can now automatically map timezone-independent datetime values to Delta Lake timestamp_ntz, ensuring greater compatibility with source systems that allow storing date and time values without time zone information. Migration Assistant for SQL database in Fabric (Generally Available) The guided, Fabric-native wizard takes you from a source SQL Server schema to a running SQL database in Fabric: upload a DACPAC, review compatibility results, deploy the schema with Copilot-assisted fix suggestions, and copy your data using built-in Fabric Copy Jobs. We've added the capability preview customers asked for most: Validate. You can now check out a DACPAC for compatibility before creating a SQL database in Fabric. Upload the file and the assistant reports which schema objects will deploy cleanly, which ones use features that aren't supported, the reason behind each failure, and the dependencies between objects — with nothing provisioned and no capacity consumed. That means you can scope migration effort, plan remediation, and get change-approval sign-off before you commit to a target database. To get started, select Migrate in your Fabric workspace and choose Migrate to SQL database in Fabric. To learn more, refer to the Fabric Migration Assistant documentation. Until next month That's a wrap for the August 2026 Microsoft Fabric Monthly Update. As always, we'll continue sharing new capabilities, enhancements, and improvements across Microsoft Fabric in future monthly updates. Thank you for being part of the Fabric community!Fabric March 2026 Feature Summary
Welcome to the Fabric March 2026 Feature Summary—and welcome to FabCon! As we kick off FabCon, this update captures the momentum we’re seeing across the Fabric platform and the conversations happening with customers and partners right now. March brings a wide range of enhancements across governance, data engineering, real-time intelligence, data science, extensibility, and AI—all designed to help teams build, operate, and scale end‑to‑end data solutions with confidence. Many of the capabilities highlighted here reflect direct feedback from the community and real‑world usage we’ve learned from—including insights shared leading up to (and during) FabCon. We are eager to share what’s new and to continue the conversation throughout the week. If you haven’t already, check out Arun Ulag’s hero blog “FabCon and SQLCon 2026: Unifying databases and Fabric on a single, complete platform” for a complete look at all of our FabCon and SQLCon announcements across both Fabric and our database offerings. Contents https://youtu.be/xhrSMNNX5ho?si=aTWiAMq0PvtTxej8 Events and Announcements Don’t miss the next Monthly Data Days Sessions On March 26 we have a special edition of Fabric Data Days featuring two topics. Join us at 8 AM Pacific for a session on getting started with Fabric IQ. Then at 3 PM Pacific we’ll discuss mapping and spatial analytics in Fabric. Register now! Couldn't make it to Atlanta or just want more FabCon + SQLCon? Join us in Barcelona this September. FabCon Europe is happening again in 2026. Mark your calendars for September 28 – October 1, 2026. Register now to access Super Early Bird pricing! Fabric Platform OneLake Catalog Govern for admins (Generally Available) In today’s data-driven world, effective data governance is crucial to ensure the integrity, security, and usability of data. OneLake catalog is available for Fabric admins, providing tools and insights to govern and secure data estates within Fabric in one place. Figure: OneLake Catalog: Govern for Admin view Figure: OneLake Catalog: Govern for admin—view more report. OneLake Catalog search API and MCP tool (Preview) OneLake Catalog’s Search 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 and the user’s permissions. 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. The catalog search capability is also included as a built-in tool in the Fabric Core MCP server so AI agents can reliably locate the right Fabric asset as part of a broader workflow, then continue with follow‑up actions using other tools. Workspace tags (Generally Available) Fabric tags add meaningful metadata so people can find the right content faster and organize it consistently. That capability is available for workspaces. Workspace tags add shared context (like team, project, or cost center) at the workspace level, helping teams discover and manage workspaces more efficiently, while also enabling scalable governance through APIs. Figure: Workspace settings screen showing applied workspace tags Workspace tags are built on the existing Fabric tags model: tags are defined once, then applied on items and workspaces. Workspace admins can apply and remove tags in workspace settings, making it easy to add shared context at the workspace level. A workspace can have up to 10 tags applied. Workspace tags are surfaced in key discovery experiences so they’re usable in day-to-day navigation: Workspaces can be filtered by tags both in the workspaces list and in OneLake Catalog Explorer, a tags indicator also appears in the workspaces list and in OneLake Catalog Explorer next to every tagged workspace. Tag names are shown on the workspace screen itself, making the workspace context immediately visible. Tagging can be retrieved and managed at scale using APIs, enabling consistent application and reporting across workspaces. Data loss prevention policies for Fabric—Extending restrict access to structured data in OneLake (Preview) When handling sensitive data, it might be challenging to find the right balance between federating data and keeping it secure and compliant. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies enable organizations to detect sensitive data and surface it to users and admins when it is found. The Restrict Access action allows you to restrict access to your data once the sensitive information is detected. DLP Restrict Access reduces the risk of exposure to unauthorized users, without slowing analytics or collaboration. Customers can scale Fabric with confidence, meeting compliance requirements while enabling secure, enterprise-wide data sharing. With this release, you’ll be able to apply access restrictions through DLP on: Warehouses KQL databases SQL databases Lakehouses (previously supported) Semantic models (previously supported) Cosmos DB and mirrored databases are coming soon. Figure: Fabric warehouse with a restrict access indication Admins can ensure that sensitive data is protected consistently wherever it lives and however it is accessed. Learn more about restrict access in DLP. Lakehouse Signals in IRM (Generally Available) Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management cross-references millions of signals across all your products, to create comprehensive profiles of potentially unethical behavior inside your organization. Using Lakehouse indicators in Insider Risk Management enables security teams to detect and investigate risky data activity in OneLake with greater precision and context. By incorporating Fabric Lakehouse signals directly into insider risk policies, security teams can correlate data access and movement with DLP, labeling, and audit signals in a single investigation experience—reducing blind spots and accelerating response to potential data exfiltration or misuse. This provides stronger protection for high‑value analytics data while maintaining built‑in privacy controls and avoiding the operational overhead of deploying separate monitoring tools. Figure: Lakehouse indicators used within the IRM tool Learn more about Fabric indicators in Insider Risk Management. Quick policy for data theft for Fabric (Generally Available) A new quick policy for the Data Theft rule is available for Fabric. This streamlined experience makes it easier to set up protection against data exfiltration scenarios, helping security teams take action faster when sensitive Fabric data is at risk. Learn more about IRM quick policies. Insider Risk Management PAYG Usage Report (Generally Available) The Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management pay-as-you-go feature usage report is designed to provide transparency to customers, enabling more accurate budget planning and policy tuning. IRM admins can check the distribution of PAYG processing units billed across workloads (Fabric), sub-workloads (Power BI, Lakehouse), and indicators (downloading Power BI reports, etc.) to fine-tune their policies and plan PAYG budgets accordingly. Figure: Pay-as-you-go Usage Report Purview DSPM for AI for Fabric Copilots and data agents (Preview) As AI adoption accelerates, organizations need built‑in protections to keep data safe. With Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) for AI, customers gain visibility and control over AI interactions. DSPM for AI helps teams spot sensitive data risks in AI prompts and responses, identify risky AI behavior, and apply consistent governance using familiar tools like DSPM, Insider Risk Management, Audit, and eDiscovery—so organizations can move faster with AI, without compromising security or compliance. bric_Copilot Figure: Purview DSPM for AI report showing Data Agent interaction in Fabric Learn more about DSPM for Fabric Copilots. Branched workspace with Git integration (Preview) Branched workspace is a new developer experience designed to simplify how teams work with feature workspaces during a branch‑out flow. With clearer visual cues and richer context, developers can easily understand workspace relationships and work more confidently when branching and iterating on features. This feature will be released by the end of March 2026. Figure: Fabric workspace tree showing the new relation between workspace and branched workspace Follow our new Git developer experiences in Microsoft Fabric (Preview) announcement. Selective branching with Git integration (Preview) Fabric Git Integration Branch-out with selective branching introduces a more focused branch‑out experience in Fabric. Developers can select only the items they need for a feature, reducing clutter in the target workspace, improving reliability, and accelerating time‑to‑code. By working with a smaller, purpose‑built workspace, developers can iterate faster and with greater confidence. Figure: Branch-out selective branching dialog Follow our new Git developer experiences in Microsoft Fabric (Preview) blog announcement. Compare code changes with Git integration (Preview) The new compare code changes experience helps developers confidently sync their Fabric workspace with a connected Git branch by clearly showing what changed before taking action. It provides a familiar code‑compare experience that highlights the exact differences since the last sync—down to the item and file level—whether the change originated in the workspace or in the repository. This makes it easier to review updates, understand their impact, and resolve conflicts by comparing workspace and Git versions side by side before committing, updating, or undoing changes. Figure: Git Integration code compares changes dialog Follow our new Git developer experiences in Microsoft Fabric (Preview) blog announcement. Connection reference item type in Variable Library (Preview) The new connection reference item type in Variable Library introduces a new way to manage external data connections in Microsoft Fabric. This new variable type lets you reference existing connections—such as Azure SQL or Snowflake—by storing a connection ID in the Variable Library, instead of embedding static connection strings in code. Figure: Variable Library “connection reference” item type option Connection reference variables work seamlessly with CI/CD and Git, enable safer environment‑specific configuration across dev, test, and prod, and ensure only authorized connections can be selected through the UI. This makes it easier to build, deploy, and manage Fabric solutions with cleaner configuration, stronger governance, and improved portability across CI/CD stages. Bulk import and export items definition APIs (Preview) These APIs enable you to programmatically export, import, and synchronize Fabric item definitions across workspaces at scale—all through the Fabric REST API. Every Fabric item—whether it’s a Notebook, Report, Semantic Model, Data Pipeline, or KQL Dashboard—has an underlying item definition: a portable schema containing the item’s full configuration and content (encoded in Base64). The Import & Export Batch APIs let you: Export item definitions individually or in bulk from any workspace Import (create) items from definitions into a target workspace Update existing item definitions in-place for continuous deployment List & paginate through all items in a workspace for batch operations Key scenarios Workspace migration: Moving items across workspaces, tenants, or regions is one of the most common requests from Fabric customers. The batch APIs let you export all items from a source workspace into a portable JSON manifest, then import them into any target workspace. This is invaluable for replicating environments across different tenants and cloning a production workspace for testing purposes. CI/CD and DevOps integration: To support enterprise DevOps practices in Microsoft Fabric, organizations can integrate the new Bulk Export and Import APIs into their CI/CD pipelines. Fabric item definitions can be treated as code—exported and versioned in Git using Fabric Git Integration or the bulk-export API, validated through pull request workflows, and promoted through a well-defined release process. When deploying across workspaces, the bulk-import API enables consistent, automated promotion into test and production environments using the underlying Fabric dependency logic that creates new items in the correct order, retains the original relations, and updates existing ones in place. Metadata backup and recovery: Schedule periodic batch exports to capture the full state of your workspace as versioned JSON manifests. Store them in Azure Blob Storage, a Git repository, or any durable storage. If something goes wrong, re-import the manifest to restore your workspace to a known-good state. Metadata scanning and lineage analysis: Tools that analyze report definitions to discover data lineage—such as which semantic model columns are used in each report—can extract hundreds of report definitions in bulk instead of one at a time, reducing scan time.Export (read) operationsMethod Endpoint Description POST /workspaces/{workspaceId}/items/bulkExportDefinitions?beta=true Export an item’s full definition as Base64-encoded parts. May return 202 for LRO. Import (write) operationsMethod Endpoint Description POST /workspaces/{workspaceId}/items/bulkImportDefinitions?beta=true Create/Update an existing item’s definition in-place. Ideal for CI/CD sync. Resources Full announcement: Bulk import/export items definition APIs API documentation: Fabric Items API Reference Comprehensive guide: Item Management Overview Item definition structure and formats: Item Definition Reference How to handle async operations with polling: Long-Running Operations Guide App registration and authentication setup: Microsoft Entra ID Documentation CI/CD tutorial using Bulk API: CI/CD tutorial using the Bulk Export and Import APIs Fabric CLI v1.5—Power BI Scenarios, CI/CD Deployments, and DX Improvements The Fabric CLI v1.5 is the most scenario-driven update yet. Power BI developers can now trigger semantic model refreshes, rebind reports, and script end-to-end deployment workflows—all from the terminal, without portal context-switching. The release also adds a new deploy command for CI/CD, interactive REPL mode, JMESPath filtering, notebook export in multiple formats, Python 3.13 support, and expanded coverage for Fabric items. Many of these improvements are community-contributed, making the CLI a comprehensive open-source automation surface for Fabric. CI/CD deployments from the CLI—deploy workspaces in One Command A new deploy command integrates the Fabric CI/CD Python library directly into the Fabric CLI, enabling full workspace deployments—including item rebinding and configuration—from a single command. Teams can run deployments from their terminal, GitHub Actions, or Azure DevOps pipelines. Combined with Service Principal authentication and federated credentials for GitHub OIDC, this enables zero-touch, Git-based promotion workflows that fit modern DevOps practices—no custom scripts or additional tools required. For usage examples, refer to the CI/CD examples and setup guide. Fabric CLI as an Execution Layer for AI Agents Fabric CLI is designed to work well with AI agents. A structured agent instructions file and a dedicated Fabric CLI Skill provide AI assistants like GitHub Copilot and Claude with the context they need to generate correct CLI commands from natural language. Improved error messages with actionable guidance help agents self-correct, and the interactive REPL mode enables persistent terminal sessions for multi-step agent workflows. Using a CLI as the execution layer for AI agents is an emerging industry pattern—instead of agents calling raw REST APIs (which require extensive token-heavy context about endpoints, auth, and payloads), agents issue concise CLI commands that encapsulate that complexity, making AI-driven Fabric automation more practical and reliable. Learn more with Fabric CLI agent docs and AI assets on GitHub. Fabric Remote MCP Server: AI agents operate directly in your Fabric environment Fabric Remote MCP is a cloud-hosted MCP server that allows AI agents to perform real operations in your Fabric environment—create workspaces, manage permissions, work with item definitions, and more. No local installation is required. Agents authenticate via Entra ID and operate within your existing RBAC boundaries, with every tool invocation recorded in audit logs. The preview launches with capabilities spanning workspace management, item CRUD and definitions, and permission management. It works with any MCP-compatible client, including GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude Desktop. Learn more in this blog post: Introducing Fabric MCP (Preview). Fabric MCP AI code assistants (Generally Available) The Fabric Local MCP is an open-source MCP server that runs on your machine. This solution integrates AI coding assistants with the comprehensive Fabric API, offering OpenAPI specifications, best-practice guidelines, item definition schemas, and example payloads to enable agents to produce precise, production-ready code while minimizing errors. OneLake tools enable live file operations including upload, download, table inspection, and item creation. This update introduces integrated authentication, automatic retry, production SLAs, and telemetry. Install via npx Microsoft/fabric-mcp in any MCP-compatible client—it works with VS Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, and more. Fabric Local MCP on GitHub.Fabric Fabric Extensibility Extensibility (Generally Available) After six months in preview mode, gathering feedback, resolving bugs, and strengthening the platform, we’ve reached the next milestone. Partners and customers can build, validate, and publish custom Fabric workloads to production with full Microsoft support. Key highlights: All core capabilities are stable and supported: OneLake storage, native item lifecycle, Entra token acquisition, iFrame relaxation, Workload Hub publishing. The Starter Kit ships with production-ready UI components (ItemEditor, WizardControl, OneLakeView, and more) that reduce time to first workload. GitHub Copilot integration and a new DevContainer/GitHub Codespaces setup reduce setup effort—no local machine required. The first Fabric Extensibility Community Contest drew strong community participation, with real workloads already appearing in the Workload Hub. Learn more about Fabric Extensibility (Generally Available). CI/CD & remote support (Preview) Three new features further enhance the professional development experience for Fabric workloads. CI/CD Support Workload items are first-class citizens in Fabric's CI/CD platform. Items participate in Git integration and Deployment Pipelines with no custom tooling. Variable Library support means items automatically pick up workspace-specific configuration (e.g., the right Lakehouse reference) when promoted across dev, test, and production—no hard-coded IDs, no manual reconfiguration. Figure: CICD enablement for Hello World Sample Variable Library Support Items can be read from Fabric's Variable Library, allowing workspace-specific configuration (e.g., the right Lakehouse reference) to resolve automatically when an item is promoted across dev, test, and production stages—no hard-coded IDs, no manual reconfiguration, and no custom deployment hook logic required. An opt-in webhook that fires whenever a workload item is created, updated, or deleted—regardless of whether it happened through the UI, the REST API, or a CI/CD pipeline. It’s designed for licensing checks, infrastructure provisioning, and external system synchronization. There’s no impact on workloads that don't register an endpoint. Figure: Variable Picker within Fabric Cloud Shell Item Remote lifecycle notification API Workloads are no longer just passive objects sitting in a workspace. The Remote Lifecycle Notification API is an opt-in capability—there is no requirement to use it. If your workload does not need backend notifications, you simply don't register an endpoint, and everything works exactly as before. Fabric Scheduler / Remote Jobs This feature allows workload items to expose named job types that users can schedule directly from Fabric. When a scheduled job fires, Fabric calls a registered endpoint on your workload backend—passing along the item context and a delegated user token. For all these features, you’ll find samples in the Toolkit Starter Kit. Learn more about Fabric Extensibility CI/CD and remote capabilities in this blog post. What's new in workload management As the Fabric extensibility ecosystem grows, with partners publishing workloads and organizations building custom solutions, managing workloads at scale demands more than a single settings page. IT admins need centralized governance and a clear overview of what's being used across the organization, and workspace teams need self-service agility. Three key workload management features for Microsoft Fabric Extensibility will launch by April 1, 2026: Workload admin portal (Generally available) Add workload to workspace (Generally available) Workload management admin APIs (Preview) These will enhance governance through portal, API, and self-service capabilities. Admin portal: centralized admin workload overview (Generally Available) The Fabric Admin Portal now includes a dedicated Manage Workloads tab, a single pane of glass for workload governance across your organization. Centralized workload visibility: view all workloads available for assignment in your tenant in a single centralized view, including status information and workload details. Tenant assignment controls: manage workload assignment at the tenant and workspace level. Add workload to workspace (Generally available) The workspace-level workload assignment was previously introduced in Preview. It allows workspace admins to add workloads directly to one or more workspaces. How it works (Workspace admins): Navigate to the Workload Hub from the left menu in Microsoft Fabric or from your workspace settings. Browse or search for the workload you want to add. Select "Add Workload" and select "To Workspace" from the dropdown. Select your workspaces: search, check the workspaces you want, and use "View more/less" to manage the list. Select "Add": the workload is immediately available in your selected workspaces. Workload Management Admin APIs: Overview and Control at Scale (Preview) Capabilities For Fabric admins who need a programmatic view of their workload landscape, the new Workload Management Admin APIs provide governance and oversight across the tenant through a REST interface. List all workloads: view all workloads available to be added in the tenant, and view which workloads were added. List all workload assignments in the tenant. Drill down into a specific workload and view where it was added (tenant, workspace, capacity). Manage workload assignments (add or remove) to capacities, workspaces, and tenant. Self-service workload publishing (Generally Available) A frequent question from ISV partners using the Microsoft Fabric Extensibility Toolkit is: "How do I get started publishing?" Key features Self-service workload publishing is expected to be generally available by the end of March 2026. ISV partners will be able to publish workloads directly to selected customer tenants for private preview without requiring a manual submission request. This can accelerate time to market and support faster iteration with customers. Self-Service Workload Publishing gives ISV partners full control over their private preview journey: Publish to up to 20 customer tenants: share your workload with selected customers for testing and validation, no Microsoft certification required. Workload name reservation: reserve your globally unique workload name (e.g., Contoso.DataQuality) to protect your brand identity before formal publication. Automated validation: your workload package is automatically validated against manifest schema, naming conventions, and security requirements at upload time. Seamless path to general availability: once validated with customers, use the same workload package to pursue formal certification and publish to the global Workload Hub. OneLake Third-party support for OneLake security This month, we announced third‑party support for OneLake security, taking an important step toward interoperable data security. As customers increasingly build lake‑first architectures on open formats like Delta and Iceberg, they expect the freedom to use multiple analytics engines without copying data or redefining security. OneLake security addresses this need by enabling security to be defined once and enforced consistently wherever data is accessed. At the core of this capability is the authorized engine model. Security policies—including role‑based permissions, row‑level security (RLS), and column‑level security (CLS)—are centrally defined and managed in OneLake, while enforcement happens at query time inside the engine reading the data. Authorized third‑party engines securely retrieve the relevant metadata and effective security definitions through OneLake APIs and apply them during query execution. This ensures users see only the rows and columns they are permitted to access, while OneLake remains the single source of truth for access control. To support adoption, we’ve published implementation guidance and setup documentation for both engine builders and users. The APIs are designed to be engine-agnostic and easy to integrate by providing pre-computed effective access definitions. Looking ahead, we’ll continue evolving OneLake security APIs, including adding support for bitmap-based RLS enforcement. With this release, data vendors can integrate directly with OneLake security, customers can maintain a single security model, and users gain the flexibility to query OneLake data using the engines of their choice. OneLake file explorer (Generally Available) You can easily access and organize all your OneLake data from Windows using the OneLake file explorer. The file explorer lets you browse every workspace and data asset, and upload, download, or edit these files using the same familiar experience as OneDrive. By bringing data lakes into the Windows file system, the file explorer makes enterprise data more accessible for business users. Data Engineering Fabric Runtime 2.0 (Preview) Fabric Runtime 2.0 (Preview) is a next-generation runtime that is purpose-built for large-scale data computations in Microsoft Fabric and introduces key features and components that enable scalable analytics and advanced workloads. Apache Spark: 4.0 Components include Operating System: Azure Linux 3.0 (Mariner 3.0) Java: 21 Scala: 2.13 Python: 3.12 Delta Lake: 4.0 This screenshot demonstrates how you can switch to Runtime 2.0 at the Workspace settings and the Environment levels. Figure: Change runtime at the workspace settings level Explore the full documentation and start using Runtime 2.0 in Fabric. Custom Live Pools for Fabric Data Engineering Modern data engineering workloads are rarely one‑size‑fits‑all. Teams often need predictable performance, isolated resources, or customized configurations for critical production pipelines and high‑value interactive development. At the same time, Spark session startup times can degrade in real-world enterprise environments, especially when users have custom library dependencies. Workspaces or tenants are secured with Private Links or Managed Private Endpoints. In these scenarios, Spark clusters must be created on demand within strict network boundaries, and libraries need to be resolved and installed dynamically, adding noticeable startup latency. Custom Live Pools address this challenge by introducing dedicated, long‑lived Spark pools that stay warm inside your network boundary and come preconfigured with the required dependencies. With Custom Live Pools, Fabric Data Engineering now enables you to: Create dedicated Spark pools and schedule them tailored to your workload needs. Reduce session startup overhead by keeping pools warm with libraries preinstalled. Run reliably within Managed VNets and Private Link–enabled environments. ompute_configuration_panel_within_a_data_analytics_platfo Figure: Animated GIF demonstrating the setup of custom live pools in an Environment Because these pools are already provisioned within the workspace’s network boundary and fully initialized with dependencies, users can start working immediately, without paying the repeated cost of cluster spin‑up and library installation. Custom Live Pools are ideal for: Production pipelines that require consistent SLAs. High‑value interactive notebooks used by data developers. Teams operating in secure or regulated environments. How to set up a Custom Live Pool: Navigate to your Compute tab in your Environment. Select Spark pool and enable the option for Live Pool. Specify the Schedule, Time period of inactivity, and Retrigger frequency. Job concurrency and queue monitoring experience for Fabric Data Engineering As organizations scale their Fabric usage, understanding what’s running, what’s queued, and why becomes essential. The new job concurrency and queue monitoring experience delivers deep visibility into Spark workload execution across your environment. View active, queued, and completed jobs in a single place. Understand why jobs are queued and how concurrency limits are applied. Identify bottlenecks caused by capacity or concurrency constraints. Make informed decisions to tune workload scheduling and resource allocation. Figure: GIF demonstrating the new job concurrency and queue monitoring view in the Data Engineering/Science Spark settings page of Workspace settings Accessing workspace monitoring To view concurrency and queue signals for your specific workspace: Navigate to Workspace settings. Select Data Engineering/Science > Spark settings. Select Jobs to view the live view of your workspace level Spark queue and concurrency. Resource Profiles for Fabric Data Engineering Modern data engineering teams shouldn’t need to be Spark experts to get great performance. With Resource Profiles in Fabric Data Engineering, users simply describe what they’re trying to do, and Fabric automatically recommends the optimal compute configuration. Figure: GIF demonstrating the new resource profiles experience in workspace settings Simple inputs, smart recommendations Instead of tuning dozens of Spark settings, users provide a few high‑level workload details through an intuitive UI: Primary use case, such as a specific medallion layer (Bronze, Silver, or Gold) or task‑based optimization (read‑heavy or write‑heavy workloads). Typical data volume. Data characteristics, such as whether input data contains many small files. Maximum capacity units (CU) for the Spark pool. Once these inputs are provided, users select Get recommendation, and Fabric automatically generates an optimized configuration tailored to that workload. Based on the inputs shown above, Fabric recommends: The appropriate Resource profile. Node family and size. Autoscale and dynamic executor settings. Optimized Spark driver and executor cores and memory. A compatible runtime version. All recommendations are derived from proven best practices and internal performance tuning, removing guesswork and trial‑and‑error. Where to configure Users can enable and manage Resource Profiles from workspace settings: Go to Workspace settings > Data Engineering and Data Science > Resource optimization. Select or edit the optimized profile for the workspace. Rerun the Optimize for your use case flow as workloads evolve. Apply consistent configurations across all Spark workloads in the workspace. Once configured, all notebooks and pipeline‑triggered Spark jobs inherit these optimized settings automatically, without requiring per‑notebook configuration. Why this matters This experience enables: Performance by default: optimized compute without manual tuning. Consistency: the same performance characteristics across users and jobs. Better price‑performance: right‑sized resources aligned to workload intent. Lower operational overhead: fewer tuning cycles and support escalations. As workloads change over time, teams can simply revisit the optimization flow, update a few inputs, and let Fabric adapt the configuration—without rewriting code or Spark settings. Figure: Introduction to Resource Profiles Experience Figure: Recommendations generated based on user inputs To learn more about the Resource Profiles experience in Microsoft Fabric Data Engineering, refer to the Microsoft Learn documentation. Installing libraries with Quick mode in Spark Environment (Preview) Managing libraries shouldn’t slow down your development workflow. In Microsoft Fabric Environments, we’re introducing a more efficient way to iterate on libraries while keeping production workloads stable and reliable. Fabric Environments now support two complementary library installation modes that you can use side by side: Quick mode: a fast, on-demand installation path designed for development and experimentation, where libraries are installed when a notebook runs. This avoids heavy processing during the environment publishing and significantly reduces publish time and notebook startup latency when you’re iterating on lightweight or frequently changing dependencies. Full mode: a snapshot‑based installation path optimized for production workloads and pipelines, where libraries are fully resolved, validated against the Spark runtime, and published as a stable snapshot to ensure consistency and reproducibility. Figure: Add libraries in Quick mode and Full mode This new feature lets you move faster during development without compromising production stability. You can keep your core, production‑ready libraries in the snapshot‑based mode, while using the on‑demand path to quickly test new packages or iterate on custom libraries, all within the same Environment. Dynamic session sharing limit up to 50 for high concurrency Fabric High Concurrency Spark sessions enable both interactive exploration and large‑scale, pipeline‑driven notebook execution, supporting parallel, scheduled, and event‑driven workloads at enterprise scale. Customers often achieve higher density by packing notebooks into a shared High Concurrency (HC) session using session tags, effectively fitting up to five notebooks per session to control startup overhead and cost. While effective, this approach relies on static limits and manual tuning. With this update, Fabric Data Engineering allows the maximum number of notebooks attached to a High Concurrency session to be increased up to 50, enabling dynamic session sharing at much higher scale. Where to set the configuration You can set the configuration in the Environment item that your notebooks or pipeline‑triggered notebooks use: Go to Workspace → Environments Select the Environment attached to your notebook or pipeline Open Spark Properties Add the High Concurrency configuration Set spark.highConcurrency.max to a value between 2 - 50 Note: This update does not change the default limit of five. This enables: Interactive notebooks, used for exploratory analysis and collaboration. Notebook jobs triggered by pipelines, running in parallel within shared HC sessions. Dynamic adjustment of session sharing limits based on workload intensity, cost, and price‑performance goals. By increasing the session sharing limit, customers can: Improve session acquisition times during peak load. Increase notebook density without fragmenting sessions. Tune concurrency to match workload demand rather than fixed defaults. Achieve better price‑performance efficiency while preserving isolation and fairness across jobs. To learn more about increasing your session sharing limit in High Concurrency mode, please check out Microsoft Learn documentation. Data export settings for notebooks With data export settings for notebooks, Microsoft Fabric empowers administrators with explicit, tenant-level control over how data leaves notebooks. This feature helps ensure that interactive analytics do not inadvertently become channels for data exfiltration. Administrators can restrict the downloading of notebooks, preventing files that may contain sensitive data, credentials, or proprietary logic from leaving the environment. Additionally, they can disable downloads of rich output content, such as table results generated from DataFrames, within the notebook experience. By managing these controls, Fabric admins can effectively prevent unintended data exfiltration from interactive notebook workflows and consistently enforce security and compliance policies across all workspaces and teams. Figure: New data export tenant setting for notebooks Figure: New data export tenant setting enabled What users experience when downloads are blocked When an administrator blocks data export: The Download option is removed from the notebook UI. Users can no longer download notebook files or rich output content generated from DataFrames in the notebook experience. Interactive exploration continues in‑place, but data cannot be extracted outside Fabric through the notebook UI. Figure: Notebook with download controls disabled due to tenant-level enforcement This ensures that notebooks remain a secure analysis surface, rather than a data export mechanism, without disrupting day‑to‑day exploration inside the platform. Why this matters Notebooks often contain more than just code: Embedded datasets Derived analytical results Business logic Confidential insights By controlling export behavior at the platform level, Fabric helps organizations: Reduce risk of accidental data leakage. Meet regulatory and audit requirements. Standardize governance across teams and regions. Data Export Settings for Notebooks reinforce Fabric’s commitment to secure‑by‑default analytics, enabling powerful interactive experiences without compromising enterprise security posture. Session starts insights into Fabric Data Engineering Fast session startup is critical for interactive analytics, and Fabric’s Starter Pools are designed to deliver Spark sessions in ~5 seconds by default. However, when that target isn’t met, users have historically had little visibility into why. Session Start Insights closes that gap by making session acquisition transparent, debuggable, and actionable. Why sessions don’t always start in five seconds In practice, session startup delays are almost always driven by user‑side configurations, not platform regressions. Common causes include: Custom compute configurations that prevent reuse of pre‑warmed Starter Pools. Pre‑installed libraries or environment dependencies that require cluster customization. Managed VNets or private networking that force isolated cluster provisioning. Unexpected high regional demand triggering fallback to on‑demand clusters. What Session Start Insights delivers Previously, users could see that a session was “starting,” but not what was happening under the hood. With this feature, Fabric surfaces clear, explicit reasons for session startup behavior directly in the product experience: Whether the session was served from a Starter Pool or required an on‑demand cluster. The exact reason a fast‑path session could not be used (for example, libraries, networking, or custom configs). Where time was spent during session acquisition. Using the session detail view to diagnose delays Navigate to the notebook’s session status or monitoring pane. Open Session Details for the active or recent session. Figure: Notebook with Session Details option Review the delay reason and session source (Starter Pool vs. on‑demand) Figure: Notebook with Session Details pane showing session start details This makes it immediately clear whether the delay was: Expected due to configuration choices Related to libraries or networking Learn more about session start insights in the Microsoft Learn documentation. Z-order and liquid clustering support in the Native Execution Engine With the Native Execution Engine, Fabric Data Engineering continues to raise the bar on price‑performance leadership for large‑scale analytics. Beyond execution‑time optimizations, the engine now includes native support for Z‑Order and Liquid Clustering, allowing advanced data layout techniques to fully benefit from vectorized, C++‑based execution paths. This ensures that storage‑level optimizations and execution‑level acceleration work together, delivering compounding performance gains for real‑world analytical workloads. Why this matters Modern analytical queries frequently: Filter on multiple high‑cardinality columns. Scan large Delta tables repeatedly. Rely on selective predicates to narrow down results. Without intelligent data layout, even a highly optimized execution engine can spend unnecessary time scanning data. By combining the Native Execution Engine with Z‑Order and Liquid Clustering, Fabric ensures that: Related data is co located on disk, enabling aggressive file and row‑group skipping. Queries scan fewer files and fewer bytes. CPU‑efficient native operators are paired with I/O‑efficient data access. On a one‑billion‑row dataset, internal benchmarks comparing fallback execution versus Native Execution Engine with clustering showed: 20–32 seconds absolute runtime reduction per query. Roughly 20%–27% improvement across multiple clustered column combinations. Performance gains observed consistently across different predicate shapes and data distributions. This brings a compounding performance effect: faster scans, fewer CPU cycles, and lower cost per query, without requiring users to rewrite Spark code or change query semantics. This helps deliver strong price-performance for analytics workloads. How users enable and use this 1. Enable the Native Execution Engine Users must first ensure that the Native Execution Engine is enabled for their Spark workloads (at the workspace, environment, or session level). Once enabled, supported Delta operations automatically run through native execution paths. 2. Use Z‑Order or Liquid Clustering on Delta tables Users can apply clustering using standard Delta Lake commands: Define Liquid Clustering at table creation or apply it to existing unpartitioned tables Use OPTIMIZE … ZORDER BY for multi‑column access patterns To learn more about the Z-Order and Liquid Clustering support or Native engine, refer to the Microsoft Learn documentation. Copilot for data engineering and data science Microsoft Fabric notebooks now include a context-aware Copilot experience designed to support you across the full notebook lifecycle. By automatically understanding your workspace environment—including attached Lakehouses, notebook structure, and runtime behavior—Copilot provides assistance that stays aligned with how your notebook is built and executed. It’s easy to get started with no session startup required. Choose the Copilot icon on the toolbar to open the chat panel. Copilot can help accelerate notebook development by generating and refining code, explaining unfamiliar logic, and assisting with larger notebook workflows. For more complex tasks, Copilot can first propose a plan and then help implement it across the notebook, allowing you to move from idea to working solution more quickly. Copilot also improves the troubleshooting experience when notebook executions fail. Instead of navigating long stack traces or ambiguous error messages, you can use Copilot to analyze failures, identify likely root causes, and review suggested fixes directly within the notebook. Figure: Fix with Copilot provides error summary and suggested fixes Throughout this process, built-in guardrails ensure you remain in control. Copilot suggestions are transparent, and proposed code changes can be reviewed before being applied. Together, these capabilities help teams reduce development friction, resolve issues faster, and build more reliable data workflows. Try the new Copilot experience today. To learn more, visit the Copilot for Data Engineering and Data Science documentation. Fabric notebook custom agent inside VS Code The Fabric notebook custom agent is a Fabric-native AI development agent embedded in the Fabric Data Engineering VS Code extension. It helps data engineers build, debug, and publish Microsoft Fabric notebooks and Spark workloads. Unlike generic coding assistants, this agent operates with full awareness of the Microsoft Fabric workspace, runtime, environments, and Lakehouse resources. It ensures every action—code generation, execution, artifact management, and publishing—is context-aware, validated, and safe for enterprise environments. Prior to the introduction of the Fabric Notebook custom agent within the VS Code extension, there were notable limitations in how language models understood and interacted with the Microsoft Fabric environment. For instance, when users provided a prompt such as "read the parquet file from the current default Lakehouse and save it to a delta table," the language model was unable to interpret what was meant by "default Lakehouse." As a result, it would generate standard Spark code without leveraging the built-in spark variable available within the notebook, which is essential for initializing and managing Spark sessions in the Fabric environment. With this new agent, the following code will be generated and ready to run. # Read parquet file from default lakehouse df = spark.read.parquet("Files/green_tripdata_2022-08.parquet") # Write to delta table in dbo schema df.write.mode("overwrite").format("delta").saveAsTable("dbo.raw_green_tripdata_202208") This custom agent should be automatically activated once the Notebook is open. Figure: Fabric notebook custom agent For more detail, refer to the Author notebook inside VS Code documentation. Tenant switching inside Fabric Data Engineering VS Code extension ISV and partners often collaborate with multiple end customers, each typically operating within their own dedicated Microsoft Fabric tenant. To address this need for flexibility, the Fabric Data Engineering VS Code extension now enables tenant switching. With this enhancement, ISVs and partners can easily transition between different customer projects within the same VS Code window, eliminating the need for repeated sign-in processes. This streamlined experience simplifies managing multiple projects and improves overall productivity for professionals working across diverse customer environments. To switch to a different tenant, select the currently signed-in Fabric user in the status bar and pick the target tenant from the list. Figure: Switch Fabric tenant inside VS Code Enable new kernels inside Fabric Data Engineering VS Code extension Users can now run Fabric notebooks within VS Code using a variety of new kernels. Previously, running notebooks required users to specify the language of each cell using cell magic commands and rely on PySpark as the execution environment. With this enhancement, three additional kernels have been introduced, allowing users to select their preferred programming language directly at the kernel level. This eliminates the need for cell magic commands and streamlines the process, enabling notebooks to be executed in Python, Scala, or Spark SQL natively within VS Code. Choose Microsoft Fabric Runtime from the top-level kernel list. The available languages then appear in the second panel. Figure: Microsoft Fabric Runtime entry Figure: Supported Fabric notebook languages in VS Code For more detail, please refer to the documentation Author notebook inside VS Code. Support for multiple schedules in Fabric materialized lake views MLVs now support multiple named schedules per lakehouse. Previously, all MLVs shared a single schedule, and teams needing different refresh timings resorted to notebook-triggered refreshes. This workaround bypasses dependency management, centralized error reporting, and retry logic; failures can persist for weeks undetected. Each named schedule now targets a specific subset of views. A finance pipeline can refresh hourly while an analytics pipeline runs every six hours, with no scripting required. When a schedule fires, Fabric refreshes upstream dependencies in order, runs independent views in parallel, surfaces errors centrally, and skips overlapping runs. Figure: Schedules panel for materialized lake views, showing configured schedules and available actions For more information, refer to the Schedule a materialized lake view run documentation. PySpark support for Fabric materialized lake views (Preview) MLVs now support PySpark authoring (Preview), letting data engineers create, refresh, and replace MLVs from Fabric notebooks using the DataFrameWriter API. Previously, teams wrote definitions in Spark SQL, which made custom cleansing logic, UDFs for business rules, and procedural transformations harder to express. With PySpark authoring, MLVs gain access to the entire Python ecosystem. A gold-layer MLV can score transactions against a fraud detection model, standardize addresses using a geocoding library, or validate records against external regulatory rules. All existing MLV capabilities, including data quality constraints, table properties, and scheduled refreshes, work identically with PySpark-authored definitions. Full refresh only today; optimal refresh is coming soon. For more information, refer to the PySpark reference for materialized lake views (Preview) documentation. Move data from source to Lakehouse in a few moves using Copy job Getting data into your Lakehouse should be straightforward. For many customers, the first interaction with Microsoft Fabric begins right after creating a Lakehouse and selecting Get data. With this update, Copy job appears at the top of the Get data experience in Lakehouse, making it a more discoverable way to bring data into Fabric. Whether you’re onboarding your first dataset or scaling ingestion across multiple sources, Copy job can help you move data with minimal setup so you can focus on insights instead of configuration. Fabric notebooks now support lakehouse auto‑binding when used with Git, making notebooks far more portable across environments such as dev, test, and prod. Instead of hard‑binding a notebook to a specific lakehouse, Fabric automatically resolves the correct lakehouse as the notebook moves across Git‑connected workspaces, reducing manual rebinding and environment‑specific fixes. This feature is opt‑in and must be enabled from the notebook settings page. Once enabled, it applies to all lakehouses referenced in the notebook, including the default and any additional lakehouses. The configuration is stored in a system‑managed notebook-settings .JSON file in the Git repo, which should not be edited manually. Overall, lakehouse auto‑binding helps teams focus on versioning notebook logic while keeping data and environment configuration cleanly separated. Try it out in just a few steps: Create or open a Lakehouse. Select the Get data dropdown in the ribbon. Figure: Start ingesting data into a Lakehouse directly from the Get data dropdown using Copy job Select New Copy Job You’ll be redirected to the Copy Job experience, where you can choose the source data you want to ingest from. In just a few clicks, your data is copied into the Lakehouse and ready for exploration, analysis, and downstream analytics. Learn more: What is Copy Job in Data Factory – Microsoft Fabric Notebook supports Lakehouses auto-binding in Git Fabric notebooks now support lakehouse auto-binding when used with Git flow, making notebooks more portable across environments such as dev, test, and prod. Instead of hard-binding a notebook to a specific lakehouse in the original workspace, auto-binding lets the notebook automatically resolve the linked lakehouse as it moves across Git-connected workspaces. This reduces manual rebinding and environment-specific fixes. This feature is opt‑in and must be enabled from the notebook settings page. Once enabled, it applies to all lakehouses referenced in the notebook, including the default and any additional lakehouses. Figure: Entry of auto-binding setting in notebook The configuration is stored in a system‑managed ‘notebook-settings .json’ file in the Git repo. Overall, lakehouse auto‑binding helps teams focus on versioning notebook logic while keeping data and environment configuration cleanly managed. Notebook Resources Folder Support in Git Notebook projects often depend on more than just notebook code—such as reusable Python modules, configuration files, or small supporting assets. Fabric notebooks now support committing the built‑in Resources folder to Git, enabling true end‑to‑end source control for notebook‑based projects. These resources are versioned alongside the notebook and automatically restored during Git sync. To support real‑world workflows, this feature includes fine‑grained controls. Teams can define Git exclusion rules or use standard .gitignore files inside the Resources built in folder to avoid tracking large files, temporary assets, generated outputs, or test data. Figure: Define resources in git settings in notebook The feature is disabled by default to ensure safe adoption and does not introduce noticeable performance impact during commit or sync. The support for Environment resources folder, deployment pipelines, and public APIs is coming soon. Learn more: Notebook source control and deployment - Microsoft Fabric Fabric notebook public APIs (Generally Available) Fabric Notebook Public APIs enable notebooks to be managed and executed programmatically as first‑class assets. The APIs provide full CRUD support—enabling teams to create, update, list, and delete notebooks at scale—making them ideal for CI/CD and automated environment management. In addition, notebooks can be executed on demand via the Job Scheduler API. You can parameterize notebook runs, customize session configuration, specify environments and lakehouses, monitor execution status, and cancel runs if needed. Secure service principal authentication is also supported. A key enhancement is the ability for notebook runs to return exit values, enabling conditional branching and richer orchestration in pipelines. Together, these APIs unlock seamless integration with Fabric pipelines, external schedulers, and enterprise automation platforms. Learn more: Items - REST API (Core) and Job Scheduler - REST API (Core). Improved Copilot completion for Fabric notebooks We’re introducing upgraded Copilot completion in Fabric notebooks to deliver a faster, more accurate, and more intuitive coding experience. With this update, auto-completion is closer to what developers expect from VS Code‑style inline suggestions, helping you stay in flow while writing notebook code.You can enable the feature from the Copilot completion button in the notebook status bar. It supports both Python and PySpark notebooks. Figure: How to enable copilot completion A More Natural, Inline Coding Experience The upgraded auto‑completion is designed to work inline as you type, offering context‑aware code suggestions that better match your intent. Whether you’re writing Python logic, data transformations, or helper functions, Copilot now provides suggestions that feel more predictable, relevant, and easy to accept—reducing friction compared to earlier experiences. Faster and More Responsive Performance has been a key focus of this upgrade. Auto‑completion now responds more quickly, reducing latency between keystrokes and suggestions. This makes Copilot feel less intrusive and more like a natural extension of the editor, especially during rapid iteration or exploratory development. Higher‑Quality Suggestions That Fit Notebook Workflows Beyond speed, the quality of suggestions has improved. Copilot is better at understanding notebook context, including surrounding cells and in‑progress code, resulting in completions that require less manual editing. The goal is simple: help you write correct, readable code with fewer interruptions and less back‑and‑forth. Designed for Everyday Notebook Development This upgraded auto‑completion brings Fabric notebooks closer to the editing experience developers are already familiar with, while remaining optimized for data engineering and analytics workflows. Learn more by exploring Develop, execute, and manage notebooks - Microsoft Fabric. Create files in the notebook resources folder Fabric notebooks now let you create and manage files directly in the built‑in Resources folder, making it easier to develop and maintain notebook dependencies. You can create and edit Python modules, configuration files, and other lightweight assets alongside your notebook code and use them directly within the notebook. Figure: Entry of creating new file in notebook resources folder To learn more, refer to How to use notebooks - Microsoft Fabric. Data Science and AI Fabric data agents (Generally Available) Data sources: Build and consume data agents on a broad set of data sources, including Lakehouse, Warehouse, semantic models, Eventhouse, SQL databases, and mirrored databases. Configurations: Configure data agents using agent-level instructions, data source–specific instructions, and example queries to tailor behavior to your scenarios. Publish and share: Publishing and sharing data agents within Microsoft Fabric is generally available, making it easier to operationalize and collaborate on data agents. Figure: End-to-end data management workflow from creation through consumption This release also includes diagnostic, Git integration, and deployment pipelines as part of Microsoft Fabric’s Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) capabilities, enabling troubleshooting and lifecycle management of your agents! Advanced security and governance in data agents (Preview) Data agents in Microsoft Fabric (Preview) include capabilities that elevate security and governance standards. Through integration with Microsoft Purview, organizations gain access to comprehensive auditing, eDiscovery, data lifecycle management, communications compliance, and classification. These tools capture prompt and response telemetry along with user context, supporting enterprise protection and regulatory compliance. Additionally, we are introducing outbound access protection support for the Data Agent artifact to help mitigate sensitive data exfiltration risks and adhere to strict security policies at the individual workspace level. With these updates, organizations can monitor, control, and safeguard all data agent interactions more effectively. Data source enhancements for data agents (Preview) The latest preview brings significant enhancements to data agent source capabilities in Microsoft Fabric. Users can now connect Graph as a data source, enabling them to model and analyze complex relationships within their data for richer, AI-driven insights. Additionally, support for KQL user-defined functions (UDFs) and SQL functions is available, allowing for more sophisticated and efficient querying in KQL- and SQL-enabled sources. These enhancements make data agents more flexible and powerful, supporting faster analytics and expanded scenario coverage. Insider Risk Management PAYG Usage Report (Generally Available) Multimodal support for AI functions in Fabric enables notebook users to apply AI capabilities directly to their unstructured data—including PDFs, images, and text files. With just a few lines of code, users can perform tasks such as summarization, classification, sentiment analysis, and more, all within their existing workflows. This capability is designed to work across both pandas and Spark, making it easy to bring AI-driven insights to a wide range of data science and analytics scenarios in Fabric. Figure: Load files into a table or classify insurance claim images with multimodal AI functions Check out the multimodal AI functions documentation to learn more. AutoML in Fabric (Generally Available) AutoML delivers a fully production-ready, low-code machine learning experience. In addition to the core AutoML capabilities powered by FLAML—automated model selection, feature engineering, and hyperparameter optimization—the end-to-end UI experience, making it easy to configure experiments, monitor training progress, compare models, and deploy the best performer directly from the interface. With integrated experiment tracking, reproducibility, and seamless deployment workflows, teams can confidently move from raw data to high-quality predictive models faster—while maintaining transparency, governance, and control within Fabric. Figure: AutoML includes the fully integrated UI experience for configuring experiments, tracking model performance, and deploying models end to end Check out the AutoML in Fabric documentation to learn more. Data Warehouse Fabric Data Warehouse recovery (Preview) In fast moving production environments, an item gets dropped accidentally due to an incorrect script. Suddenly, critical reports are broken, and teams are asking the same question: “How fast can we recover?” With dropped warehouse recovery in Microsoft Fabric, a deleted warehouse no longer means starting over. You can now restore a dropped warehouse together with everything that goes with it—data, schemas, snapshots, permissions, and saved queries—in minutes, without rebuilds, re‑ingestion, or complex restore workflows. Figure: Warehouse recovery in action—from drop to restore in minutes There’s no need to recreate environments, rerun pipelines, or scramble through backups. Recovery is simple, predictable, and designed to bring your warehouse back exactly as it was before the drop. This capability is built for the realities of modern analytics: rapid iteration, frequent deployments, and shared production environments. Instead of turning accidental deletes into prolonged outages, Fabric makes recovery a routine, low-stress operation. No panic. No need to rebuild. Just built in resilience—designed for real-world production analytics. To learn more, refer to the manage workspaces documentation. Alerts and actions Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse provides operational intelligence closer to the data by integrating SQL queries with Fabric Activator rules. Traditionally, identifying an issue in query results is only the first step. Teams then need separate systems or manually follow up to notify the right people and act. With this integration, Data Warehouse makes it possible to define rules directly from SQL query outputs, so changes in data can trigger alerts and downstream actions automatically. This unlocks a simpler way to monitor business-critical conditions using familiar SQL workflows. Teams can create queries that detect scenarios such as SLA risks, failed processes, unusual trends, or threshold breaches, then attach rules that evaluate results continuously and respond in real time. The result is a more proactive analytics experience, where insights move beyond the warehouse and are acted on immediately. Figure: Create rules on SQL query results to detect data issues, monitor KPIs, and automatically trigger alerts or Fabric workflows. Analyze unstructured text using T-SQL AI functions (Preview) Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse extends modern analytics beyond structured and semi‑structured data by introducing built‑in AI functions for working directly with the unstructured text. Traditionally, processing free‑form content such as notes, logs, or comments requires external services or complex pipelines. With these new capabilities, Fabric Data Warehouse enables text extraction, classification, sentiment analysis, and transformation directly in T‑SQL language, allowing data engineers and analysts to keep AI‑driven text processing inside the warehouse. The new AI functions simplify common text analytics scenarios using familiar SQL patterns. You can extract structured insights from unstructured text, analyze sentiment in feedback or messages, and classify content such as application logs or incident reports using contextual understanding rather than fragile rules or expressions. Fabric Data Warehouse also supports text transformation scenarios, including summarization, grammar correction, and translation, making it easier to standardize and enrich text data as part of existing data preparation workflows. The following visual is example of processing unstructured text in the Comments table: Figure: Analyzing comment text with AI functions This query enriches each user's comment by determining its sentiment; labeling the type of feedback or intent; and extracting key discussion signals such as the main topic, user intent, and any requested action using built-in AI functions. For advanced scenarios, Fabric Data Warehouse enables custom prompt-based processing through a generic ai_generate_response(instructions, text) function. This function allows teams to define precise transformation or extraction rules as prompts; apply domain specific logic; and reuse AI behavior consistently across queries and pipelines. Together, these capabilities significantly broaden the scope of data warehousing scenarios supported in Fabric, unlocking new ways to analyze and operationalize unstructured text using T-SQL. Refer to AI functions in Fabric Data Warehouse to learn more about analyzing text with built-in AI functions. ANY_VALUE aggregate Fabric Data Warehouse provides the ANY_VALUE() aggregate, which lets you return an arbitrary value from each group in T-SQL query. This is especially useful when you need to group results by a key (such as GeographyID) but you still want to project descriptive attributes (such as city name, and country) that are functionally the same for every row in that group. An example of such a query is illustrated in the following picture, demonstrating how ANY_VALUE() aggregate can be used to get the values from the group that are not changing. Figure: Using ANY_VALUE() to project descriptive columns while aggregating trips by GeographyID In this pattern, city, state, and country don’t add meaning to the aggregation because they’re constant for a given GeographyID. Adding these columns in the GROUP BY clause or applying more complex or costly aggregates like MIN or MAX is unnecessary overhead and makes queries harder to read and maintain. ANY_VALUE keeps the grouping logic minimal and the intent clear: aggregate by the key and simply carry through the descriptive columns. Refer to the ANY_VALUE function in Fabric Data Warehouse documentation to find additional scenarios where it helps simplify grouping and aggregation logic. Fabric warehouse custom SQL pools (Preview) Custom SQL pools for Fabric Data Warehouse gives administrators finer-grained control over how SQL compute resources are allocated across workloads. Custom SQL pools build on the warehouse’s autonomous workload management by letting you define your own isolation boundaries, explicitly assign resources, and route queries based on application context. With Custom SQL Pools, you can create multiple isolated SQL pools within a single workspace and allocate a percentage of available compute to each. Queries are routed to the appropriate pool ensuring that critical workloads get the resources they need without being impacted by other activities in the warehouse. Figure: Custom SQL Pool Configuration Key benefits include: Predictable performance for critical workloads—Reserve compute for business‑critical reporting or dashboards, so they aren’t disrupted by ad‑hoc queries or background processing. Flexible workload isolation without added complexity—Allocate resources where they matter most without needing to split workloads across multiple workspaces or scale capacity just to protect one workload. Custom SQL Pools are especially useful when multiple applications share a single Fabric warehouse or SQL analytics endpoint and have different performance or priority requirements. As your capacity scales up or down, your pool allocations automatically scale with it, preserving the relative resource distribution you’ve defined. Learn more about custom SQL pools in Fabric Data Warehouse: Custom SQL Pools - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn. SQL Audit Logs (Generally Available) SQL Audit Logs for Fabric Data Warehouse enable organizations to capture and analyze database activity for security monitoring, compliance, and forensic analysis. Figure: Configuring SQL Audit Logs With this release, we are expanding support and improving accessibility: Support for SQL Analytics Endpoint auditing. Direct access to audit files stored in OneLake, through OneLake Explorer. Ability to download or copy audit files through OneLake Explorer. Ability to open the .xel audit files directly in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) for deeper investigation. These capabilities make it easier for security and compliance teams to perform detailed investigations, long-term retention, and external analysis of workflows. For configuration steps and usage details, see the documentation: SQL Audit Logs in Fabric Data Warehouse - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn COPY INTO and OPENROWSET support for OneLake sources (Generally Available) Previously, this capability supported Lakehouse sources only. With this release, we are expanding support to all OneLake items (except Warehouses). This enables much more flexible ingestion scenarios, including: Using partner workloads such as COPY Jobs. Using staging areas across different Fabric items. Loading data stored anywhere in OneLake-backed items. Customers can now leverage OneLake as a unified staging layer for ingestion workflows while maintaining a consistent SQL experience. Figure: Executing COPY INTO from OneLake sources For full usage examples and configuration guidance, see the documentation: Ingest Data into Your Warehouse Using the COPY Statement - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn COPY INTO (Transact-SQL) - Azure Synapse Analytics and Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn Outbound Access Protection (OAP) support for Warehouse (Generally Available) Outbound Access Protection for Fabric Data Warehouse provides stronger data exfiltration protection for enterprise environments. Warehouse now supports connector rules that allow organizations to control which external sources the warehouse can access. Customers can define rules to allow access to: Specific Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 accounts Other Fabric workspaces Approved external connectors This expands the model introduced during Preview, where access was limited to OneLake and local workspace sources only. With connector rules, organizations can enforce controlled and auditable outbound connectivity, helping meet strict governance and compliance requirements. Figure: Supporting OAP Data Connection Polices For details on configuring connector rules, see the documentation: Workspace outbound access protection for data warehouse workloads - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn Full query text available in Query Insights Query Insights now show the full SQL query text, removing the previous 8,000‑character truncation. The complete query text is available in: The command column of queryinsights.exec_requests_history. The Query Details pane in the Query activity tab. This makes it significantly easier to understand what ran, especially for large, auto‑generated queries from BI tools, ORMs, or complex workloads. You can now retrieve the full query text directly using: SELECT distributed_statement_id, submit_time, total_elapsed_time_ms, command FROM queryinsights.exec_requests_history ORDER BY submit_time DESC; This query takes the most frequently executed query (from Frequently Run Queries) and pulls every historical execution with the full, untruncated SQL text, making it easy to understand exactly what is running and how often: WITH TopQuery AS ( SELECT TOP 1 query_hash FROM queryinsights.frequently_run_queries ORDER BY number_of_runs DESC ) SELECT erh.query_hash, erh.distributed_statement_id, erh.submit_time, erh.total_elapsed_time_ms, erh.status, erh.allocated_cpu_time_ms, erh.data_scanned_remote_storage_mb, erh.command AS full_query_text FROM queryinsights.exec_requests_history AS erh JOIN TopQuery AS tq ON erh.query_hash = tq.query_hash ORDER BY erh.submit_time DESC; Because the full statement is preserved, users can: Immediately understand what logic was executed, not just which query ran. Compare query text across executions to detect subtle changes or regressions. Correlate performance issues with specific joins, filters, or aggregations. This enhancement removes a major gap between observability and action, making Query Insights a more complete tool for day-to-day production troubleshooting. Live connectivity in Migration Assistant for Fabric Data Warehouse (Preview) The live connectivity in Migration Assistant for Fabric Data Warehouse lets you migrate object metadata by connecting directly to your source system into a new Fabric warehouse. This helps you accelerate migration and reduce upfront prep by eliminating the need to generate and upload a DACPAC for the metadata step. The object metadata of schemas, tables, views, functions, and stored procedures gets migrated to warehouse. Figure: Migration using direct connection to the source system Learn more about Migrate with a Direct Connection. Simplify data access with data sources (Generally Available) Fabric Data Warehouse lets you define external data sources that act as named references to locations in your lake (for example, a root folder of a Fabric Lakehouse or an Azure Storage account). External data sources (Preview) were introduced in preview in October 2025, now they are generally available and fully integrated into the Fabric experience, with the full IntelliSense and Copilot support in the SQL query editor. The following visual shows how to create a reusable reference to the Fabric Lakehouse root folder that represents a landing zone where you can store the files before ingesting them in warehouse: Figure: Creating external data source in Fabric Data Warehouse. In the following visual, you can see how you can query files using short, relative paths that are resolved against the data source root: Figure: Accessing files in the referenced data source using the relative path Using a data source keeps queries clean and portable. You can write easy to remember relative paths (like /Files/bronze/logs/*.jsonl) instead of embedding long, environment-specific URLs everywhere in the code. This makes scripts simpler to maintain and easier to share across workspaces and environments. Find more examples about the reading files form the lake in OPENROWSET(BULK) (Transact-SQL) documentation page. Real-Time Intelligence Business Events in Microsoft Fabric (Preview) With Business Events, organizations can move from observing what happened to acting on what matters, in real time. It enables organizations to respond faster, operate more intelligently, and scale real-time decision making across analytics, automation, and AI. You can generate business events from user data functions (UDFs) and notebooks. Once generated, a single business event can power multiple downstream actions, such as: Trigger alerts and automations with Activator, responding immediately via email or Teams. Execute custom logic using user data functions, reacting programmatically to business events. Run analytics and workflows in notebooks, using events to drive downstream analysis. Provide real‑time context with AI and ML, enriching models with governed business signals. Integrate with Spark jobs, dataflows, and Power Automate, enabling distributed processing and business process automation. With Business Events in Real-Time Hub, you can explore, define, and act on critical business signals for the whole organization in a unified experience. Figure: Business Events creation experience For more information about this feature, please refer to the documentation: Business Events in Microsoft Fabric. Building event-driven, real-time applications on database changes with Fabric Eventstreams Deltaflow (Preview) Building intelligent systems that react quickly to operational database changes is simpler with this update. With the release of DeltaFlow, Fabric Eventstreams can seamlessly capture inserts, updates, and deletes from operational databases, transform them from their raw Debezium format, and make them available to downstream event-driven applications using Activator and for real-time analytics in Eventhouse. There’s no need for custom Debezium/JSON processing code or to explicitly manage destination tables through source table schema changes. Easily connect to, ingest from, and transform raw CDC feeds into analytics-ready form. to_connect_to_a_CD Figure: Enabling DeltaFlow when connecting to an Azure SQL database Detect, fetch and register source database & table schemas in the Eventstream schema registry as they evolve. Figure: Automatic registration and use of source table schemas Automatically manage tables in analytics store as they continuously evolve with source schema changes without breaking pipelines. Figure: Automatically created Eventhouse tables with analytics-ready shapes For more information about these features, please refer to the document Building real-time, event-driven applications with Database CDC feeds and Fabric Eventstreams DeltaFlow (Preview). Real-time stream processing with Fabric Eventstreams and Spark notebooks (Preview) This update brings together Fabric Eventstreams and Spark Structured Streaming, making it easier for Spark developers and data engineers to work with real-time data in Microsoft Fabric. These enhancements enable you to access streaming data in Eventstreams directly from Spark notebooks, supporting low-latency processing and end-to-end real-time AI pipelines. Easily discover Eventstreams and real-time sources available through the Real-Time Hub, right from within Fabric notebooks. Figure: Real-Time Hub view inside Fabric notebook—discover Eventstreams in seconds Connect to and process streaming data within minutes using auto-generated PySpark code snippets. Figure: Auto-generated PySpark snippet in a Fabric notebook for an Eventstream Load and use existing notebooks from the Fabric Eventstreams portal. Figure: Load a Spark notebook as an Eventstream destination—reuse and collaborate Securely connect to any Eventstream from a Fabric Spark job without connection strings and secrets, using the enhanced Spark adapter for Eventstreams. Securely connect to any Eventstream from a Fabric Spark notebook using the enhanced Spark adapter—without connection strings or secrets, and with built-in auto-retry support. For more information about these features, please refer to the blog post Bringing Together the world of Real-time Intelligence and Spark Structured Streaming (Preview). Anomaly Detector full-item experience Introducing a refreshed Anomaly Detector full‑item experience that makes it easier to create, run, and explore anomaly detection workflows from end to end. Instead of working through disconnected steps or modal flows, you now get a single, full‑page canvas that brings configuration, analysis, and results together in one place. The updated layout follows Fabric’s shared item experience, so navigation and interactions feel consistent with the rest of the platform. With this new experience, you can more quickly define detection scenarios, run analyses, and immediately dig into detected anomalies without losing context. Clearer sectioning and action cues guide you through the process—from selecting signals and parameters to reviewing anomaly trends and individual data points. Results stay visible alongside configuration, making it easy to iterate, compare outcomes, and refine your setup in real time. Figure: An updated Anomaly Detection UI that simplifies setup, visualizes trends and anomalies in real time, and highlights high‑confidence events for faster investigation The full item Anomaly Detector experience also sets the stage for deeper investigation and richer insights. By consolidating analysis and results into a unified view, you can spend less time navigating and more time understanding what’s changing in your data. Whether you’re monitoring operational metrics or exploring unexpected behavior in real-time signals, these improvements help you move from detection to insight faster and with greater confidence. Operations agent playbook improvements and messages This month sees several improvements for operations agents’ ability to monitor your data and take actions. Based on usage and feedback we’ve heard so far, operations agents are better at mapping between your instructions and the fields in the Eventhouse you connect them to. You’ll also see they can build different types of rules to monitor the specific conditions in your data, including comparing string values in the data and counting data points over time. Finally, you’ll also see better messages if the agent can’t generate a playbook based on the data, goals, and instructions you’ve configured. In those cases, the LLM will try and describe the issue for example not being able to ground a field it inferred from your instructions to a field in the Eventhouse KQL database, or the parameters for a condition or action not being clear in the instructions. For example: This makes it easier for you to debug and unblock the agent configuration. Finally, we’ve updated our best practices and sample for how to give guidance and steering to the operations agent for it to follow your instructions. Learn more about this in the Operations Agent Best Practices and Limitations documentation. Live update for Real-Time Dashboards Real-Time Dashboards now support Live update, a feature that automatically refreshes dashboard visuals when new data is ingested into your underlying data sources. Instead of relying on fixed-interval refresh - which polls your data source on a set schedule regardless of whether new data exists - Live update uses a lightweight background query to detect when data arrives and triggers a refresh only when needed. This event-driven approach offers several benefits. Your dashboards stay current without the compute overhead of constant polling, making it particularly valuable for high-frequency data monitoring scenarios where you need to see data the moment it arrives. For organizations running multiple dashboards or monitoring large data volumes, Live update reduces compute load by eliminating unnecessary refresh cycles during quiet periods. Dashboard viewers also gain flexibility with the ability to pause live updates temporarily. If you're investigating a specific data point and don't want the visuals to change, you can pause updates to analyze the current state without interruption, then resume when you're ready to return to real-time monitoring. Dashboard editors can enable Live update through the dashboard settings, with configuration options including Live update (recommended), manual update only, or a fallback refresh interval for visuals that don't support ingestion detection. Learn more about configuring Live update for your dashboards, with the What is Real-Time Dashboard? documentation. Eventstream SQL Operator (Generally Available) During preview, the Eventstream SQL Operator introduced SQL-based stream processing in Fabric, enabling customers to transform live event data using familiar SQL with rich authoring, preview, and debugging capabilities. Write to multiple destinations from a single SQL operator Consolidate your real-time processing logic into one streamlined SQL block and route results to multiple destinations in a single step. This simplifies pipeline design, making it more efficient and lowers operational overhead. The updated authoring experience makes it easy to add multiple destinations directly within the SQL editor and preview results for each output independently. During testing, dedicated output previews let you validate transformations before you publish. Figure: Route data to multiple destinations from one SQL operator. Event ordering and late event arrival handling Configure event ordering policies directly within the SQL operator to handle late-arriving and out-of-order events. Define thresholds for how long to wait for delayed data and ensure accurate, event-time–correct processing—even in the presence of network delays or asynchronous producers. These policies help build more resilient real‑time pipelines that reflect how data behaves in the real world—not just in perfect conditions. Learn more about Fabric Eventstream SQL Operator. Together, these enhancements make Eventstream SQL Operator more powerful, more intuitive, and ready for production‑grade real‑time workloads. Anomaly Detection as a source in Eventstream Anomaly Detection can be added as a source in Fabric Eventstream, allowing you to publish anomaly events directly into your Eventstream for processing and action. You can add Anomaly Detection as a source from either Eventstream or Real-Time Hub. You can enrich your anomaly events by adding business context and additional information. Further, you may route real-time events to downstream workloads for automated alerting and dashboard visualization. Where to Add This Source You can add Anomaly Detection as a source in two ways: From Eventstream – Create a new Eventstream, select Anomaly detection events as a source. Figure: Adding Anomaly Detection source within Eventstream From Real-Time Hub – Navigate to Real-Time Hub, find the Fabric events and select Anomaly detection events. Figure: Adding Anomaly Detection events in Real-Time Hub Once added, anomaly events flow seamlessly into your Eventstream, ready for transformation and routing to downstream workloads. Get Started Anomalies are now another streaming event—ready to be transformed, enriched, and acted upon. Try out Anomaly Detection as a source in Eventstream today and unlock the power of real-time anomaly pipelines. Learn more about this in the Operations Agent Best Practices and Limitations documentation. Data series colors for real-time dashboard visuals When monitoring operational data, color choices matter. A status indicator showing “Critical” in red and “Healthy” in green communicates meaning instantly—viewers can interpret the visual without reading legends or labels. With data series colors, you can make these intentional choices rather than accepting system defaults. To configure data series colors, switch to Editing mode, select the Edit icon on your tile, and expand the Data series colors section in the Visual tab of the formatting pane. From there, you can select a color for each data series in your visual. Figure: Visual formatting: data series colors setting Figure: Color palette for setting visual elements colors Learn more about customizing your Real-Time Dashboard visuals, refer to the Customize Real-Time Dashboard visuals documentation. Use Copilot to create visuals in real-time dashboards (Preview) Dashboard editors can now use Copilot to create and edit visuals in Real-Time Dashboards using natural language. When you're in Edit mode, open the Copilot pane while creating a new tile or editing an existing one. Describe the insight you need - for example, "Show me the top 10 repositories by push events this week" - and Copilot generates the KQL query, returns the data, and suggests a visual that fits your results. Figure: Real-time dashboard visual in edit mode after Copilot answer has been applied You can accept Copilot's suggestion, refine your question with follow-ups like "Group by event type" or "Filter to the dotnet organization," or edit the query directly. Once you're satisfied, add the visual to your dashboard and use the no-code formatting options to customize its appearance. To learn more, refer to the Copilot-assisted real-time data exploration documentation. Instantly run and preview functions in Microsoft Fabric Eventhouse: no code required (Preview) Previously, working with an Eventhouse function involved manually writing KQL queries. You needed to enter the function name, provide parameters in the right format, and execute the query just to see what results you would get. If you wanted to view the function's body or metadata, you had to run a separate command. That's no longer the case. With the new Preview Functions capability in Microsoft Fabric Eventhouse, you can open the function definition, run the function, and instantly preview its results, with no manual KQL, no parameter guesswork, and no extra commands. Why this matters Eventhouse functions are powerful, but environments evolve. Databases grow, teams change, and you often inherit functions you did not write. Instead of guessing what a function does or manually building a query just to test it, you can: View the function definition instantly. Run the function and preview results with a single click. Test parameterized functions interactively. Browse your function list with search and sorting. This removes friction from everyday workflows. Whether you are exploring unfamiliar logic, validating outputs before building reports, or troubleshooting unexpected results, you get clarity in seconds instead of minutes. How to view or preview a function: In DB Explorer, expand Functions and select a function. A read-only version of the function opens. Select Preview results to instantly run the function and see the output. If the function has parameters, enter your values and preview the results based on your input. The preview shows up to 100 records, providing a quick snapshot of the function’s output. Figure: DB Explorer with the Functions folder expanded and a function selected. The function opens in read-only mode, and the Preview results option is available to run the function and display the output, with fields provided to enter parameters You can view a complete list of all stored functions, including their folder, description, and optional sorting. Built-in search makes it easy to find specific functions, making navigation and discovery simple even in large databases. Figure: Functions list with all available functions in the database, with options to sort, search, and open a menu with additional actions The new Run & Preview Functions feature in Microsoft Fabric Eventhouse lets you instantly inspect function definitions and preview results without writing KQL or handling parameters manually. Quickly explore, test, and manage all your stored functions in one place, saving time and reducing friction. Learn more with the Stored functions list documentation. Workspace monitoring dashboard templates in Microsoft Fabric Eventhouse (Preview) Fabric workspace monitoring provides rich telemetry across your workspace assets, including Eventhouses, Power BI Semantic Models, Data Engineering (GraphQL), and Mirrored Databases. The workspace monitoring data is stored in an Eventhouse, part of Fabric Real-Time Intelligence. To help you turn this data into actionable insights, we have created ready-to-use real-time dashboard templates with out-of-the-box visualizations. Currently, two templates are available: one for Eventhouse items and one for semantic models. From any Workspace Monitoring Eventhouse, users can create these dashboards directly. To get started, go to your Workspace Monitoring Eventhouse, open the upper ribbon, and select Fabric Monitoring. Figure: The ribbon in the Workspace Monitoring Eventhouse allows you to create out-of-the-box dashboards for monitoring From there, choose to create: Eventhouse Monitoring Dashboard—to monitor Eventhouse items in your workspace. You can track: Ingestion results and logs. Commands and queries monitoring. Metrics related to Eventhouse performance. Semantic Model Monitoring Dashboard—to monitor Semantic Models in your workspace. You can use semantic model logs to: Identify periods of high or unusual Analysis Services engine activity by capacity, workspace, report, or user. Analyze query performance and trends, including external DirectQuery operations. Track semantic model refresh durations, overlaps, and processing steps. Monitor custom operations sent using the Premium XMLA endpoint. Once created, the dashboards are ready to use immediately, giving you instant visibility in your workspace. You can also customize them to fit your specific needs. These templates make it fast and easy to track, analyze, and act on workspace activity, all in one place. Learn more in the documentation: Visualize your workspace monitoring . Databases Database Hub in Fabric The Database Hub in Fabric is a new unified database management experience that brings databases across edge, on‑premises, cloud, and Fabric into a single, coherent view. It provides teams with one place to explore, observe, govern, and optimize their entire database estate. Built for scale, the Database Hub uses agent-assisted intelligence to continuously reason over estate-wide signals, surface what changed, explain why it matters, and guide teams toward the right next actions. With built-in observability, delegated governance, and Copilot-powered insights, database agents help teams move from insight to action faster, while humans remain firmly in control of goals, boundaries, and trust. The result is a simpler, more confident way to manage databases at scale today, and a foundation for increasingly autonomous, intelligent database operations over time. Sign up for early access. SQL database in Fabric Since reaching general availability in November 2025, SQL database in Fabric has seen rapid customer adoption as organizations modernize SQL workloads with less operational overhead and tighter integration with analytics and AI. Guided by customer feedback, the platform emphasizes simplicity, autonomy, security, and AI optimization. We are introducing a set of improvements and new features that make it easier to migrate, manage, and optimize SQL workloads in Fabric: Simplified migration with new assistant: The Migration Assistant in public preview helps SQL developers move SQL Server and Azure SQL workloads into Fabric by importing schemas, assessing compatibility, and guiding migration with minimal manual effort. Configurable autonomous management: While maintaining a SaaS-first approach, new options allow database-level control over vCore scaling, expanded compatibility levels, enhanced T-SQL features, and settings that ease application transitions without code changes. Support for all collations: All Azure SQL database collations are supported when creating a new SQL database in Fabric for enhanced global data compatibility and app development flexibility. Collations control text sorting and comparison in SQL databases, impacting filtering, searches, and multilingual content management. Users can specify collations seamlessly during database creation via the REST API across deployment methods. Check out the How to set a different collation for SQL database in Fabric demo and explore the sample code in Git repo. Enhanced data mirroring and security: Auditing and Customer Managed Keys are generally available. CMK for Fabric SQL lets you encrypt databases with your own Azure Key Vault keys to gain full control over key ownership, access, rotation, and compliance. Users can selectively manage which tables are mirrored to OneLake for immediate analytics access. AI and monitoring integration: SQL database in Fabric supports vector search with DiskANN and integrates with Azure AI Foundry for advanced semantic search and AI scenarios, alongside workspace performance dashboards for unified monitoring and optimization. Enhanced data recovery: In Fabric, when a database is deleted, it goes into a soft-deleted state into the Fabric Workspace’s Recycle Bin tab. Depending on the retention configured, the deleted database can be recovered from the Recycle bin while in retention. In addition to this Recycle bin experience, the Fabric SQL database also has the backup retention period configurable from 1-35 days. When the database is hard deleted from the Recycle bin, the backups are still available for the configured backup retention period. This new improvement allows you to restore the backup into a new database to any point in time within the restorable period. Cosmos DB mirroring with Private Link and VNET Cosmos DB mirroring with Private Link and VNET enables customers to mirror data from privately secured Azure Cosmos DB accounts into OneLake. This allows organizations to maintain consistent network security and compliance while supporting near‑real‑time analytics and AI workloads in Microsoft Fabric—strengthening Fabric’s enterprise readiness by design. Figure: Mirroring data from Azure Cosmos DB accounts secured with Private Endpoints or VNETs into OneLake To learn more, refer to the Cosmos DB Fabric Mirroring for Private Networks documentation. Data Factory—Copy Job Richer Change Data Capture (CDC) with Oracle, Fabric DW, and SCD Type 2 Copy job continues to improve the no‑code CDC experience with richer, enterprise‑ready replication patterns. This release introduces a set of enhancements in Copy job in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory that make CDC replication more powerful and easier to use without writing code: Oracle CDC source—Capture changes directly from Oracle databases. Fabric Data Warehouse sink—Replicate CDC data into Fabric Data Warehouse. SCD Type 2—Preserve full history with valid dating, and handle deletes as soft deletes. With built‑in SCD Type 2 and soft delete handling, Copy job automatically preserves every version of a record as it changes over time, instead of overwriting history. This makes it easy to answer point‑in‑time questions, support regulatory audits, and run accurate historical analytics—capabilities that traditionally require complex MERGE logic or custom code. Figure: Enabling SCD Type 2 in Copy job with One Click Learn more in the Change data capture (CDC) in Copy Job documentation. Every row is traceable with built-in audit columns Audit columns are additional metadata columns that Copy job can automatically append to every row it writes to the destination. These columns don't come from your source data—they're generated by the platform to describe the data movement itself. When you enable audit columns in Copy job, each row in your destination table can be enriched with information such as: Audit Column What It Captures Data extraction time The timestamp when the row was extracted from the source by a Copy job run File path The source file path the row was read from (applicable for file-based sources) Workspace ID The Fabric workspace ID where the Copy job resides Copy job ID The unique identifier of the Copy job item Copy job run ID The unique identifier of the specific Copy job execution Copy job name The name of the Copy job that moved the row Lower bound The lower bound value of the incremental window for the current run Upper bound The upper bound value of the incremental window for the current run Custom A user-defined static value—add any additional context your team needs. For example, you can add your source server name here Table: Audit column list With audit columns enabled, you can answer the following questions for any row in your destination table: When was this data extracted? Exact timestamp from when the row was read from the source. Where did it come from? Which file path, which data store. Which job moved it? Which Copy job from which Workspace, which specific run, by name and ID. What was the incremental scope? Lower and upper bounds tell you exactly what slice of data this run covered. No custom code. No expression authoring. Add as many audit columns as you want, and every row in every table your Copy job writes will include this metadata automatically. Figure: Setup audit column in Copy job. Figure: Output on destination data Learn more in What is Copy job in Data Factory - Microsoft Fabric. Workspace Monitoring for Faster, Scalable Troubleshooting As Copy jobs scale from a handful to hundreds, visibility becomes critical. Fabric Workspace Monitoring brings centralized, log‑level observability to Copy job executions, streaming detailed run data into a query able Monitoring Eventhouse inside your workspace. Teams can analyze failures, throughput, duration, and data volumes across all Copy jobs in one place—without inspecting jobs individually. With historical logs, cross‑item correlation, and integration with Data Activator for alerts, Workspace Monitoring helps DataOps teams detect issues earlier and troubleshoot faster at scale. Figure: PBI Report against Fabric Workspace Monitoring metric from Copy job Learn more in Workspace Monitoring for Copy Job in Microsoft Fabric - Microsoft Fabric Boost performance automatically with AutoPartitioning Moving large tables efficiently often requires careful partition tuning—but Copy job now does this automatically. With auto‑partitioning, Copy job detects large datasets and applies an optimal parallel read strategy without any manual configuration. This delivers dramatically higher throughput out of the box, whether you’re copying millions or hundreds of millions of rows. The system adapts dynamically based on data size and source characteristics, ensuring consistent performance across tables while eliminating per‑table tuning effort. Figure: Enabling auto partitioning in Copy job Learn more in What is Copy job in Data Factory More flexible incremental copy with new watermark column types Incremental copy is a core pattern for keeping analytics data up to date—but in real world systems, changes aren’t always tracked with a clean datetime column. To address this, Copy job now supports additional watermark column types, making incremental copy more flexible and applicable across a broader range of source systems Copy job now supports ROWVERSION, Date, and String (interpreted as datetime) watermark columns. This allows you to choose the column that best represents change in your source system, while Copy job continues to automatically manage state, checkpoints, and incremental windows. ROWVERSION enables precise and reliable change tracking in SQL‑based systems, capturing every insert and update without relying on application‑managed timestamps. Date watermark support works seamlessly with common columns like LastUpdatedDate or ModifiedAt, with built‑in delayed extraction to prevent data loss or overlap between runs. String (interpreted as datetime) support removes the need for custom queries or schema changes when timestamps are stored as strings, improving compatibility with real‑world schemas. These enhancements make incremental copy easier to configure, more resilient in production, and better suited for diverse enterprise data models—without adding complexity for users. Learn more in What is Copy job in Data Factory - Microsoft Fabric. Data Factory—Dataflow Gen2 Preview-only steps (Generally Available) This capability improves authoring performance without changing runtime behavior. Preview-only steps let you run specific transformations during data preview only, automatically excluding them from dataflow execution and refresh. That means your production logic stays exactly the same—while the authoring experience becomes faster, smoother, and more responsive. This capability addresses a common challenge when building Dataflow Gen2 items: iterating on logic can be slow when previews must evaluate full datasets. Preview‑only steps make it possible to temporarily reduce data volume or complexity during development, enabling faster validation of transformations without introducing conditional logic or modifying the final query definition. Common uses include filtering or isolating subsets of data to accelerate previews, testing transformation logic without waiting for full evaluation, and exploring new data sources while keeping production execution intact. Because preview‑only steps are ignored during refresh and run operations, they provide a safe way to optimize the authoring workflow without risking unintended changes in published outputs. Figure: The "Enable only in previews" option within the applied steps section Preview‑only steps are also integrated into specific authoring dialogs, including file system views and the Combine files experience. In these contexts, Dataflow Gen2 can automatically introduce preview‑only logic to limit sample data used during preview evaluation, further reducing load time while preserving the behavior of the final dataflow. With general availability, preview‑only steps become a standard part of the Dataflow Gen2 authoring model—helping teams iterate faster, validate transformations more efficiently, and maintain a clear separation between development‑time experimentation and production execution. Learn more: Preview only step in Dataflow Gen2 (Preview) - Microsoft Fabric. Fabric Variable Library integration (Generally Available) Throughout the last couple of months, we’ve removed some of the limitations such as: Variable limit: the previous limit was 50 variables. You can now reference as many variables as you need in your Dataflow. Power Query editor support and using a default value: you can now see how the variable gets evaluated within the actual Power Query editor. Not only that but within the Dataflow Gen2 experience, after enabling the input widgets through the Options menu, you will also have a new way that simplifies how you can reference variables with a complete no code experience fully integrated into the experiences and dialogs that you love from Dataflow Gen2: Figure: The Filter rows dialog within Dataflow Gen2 showing the input widget and the option to Select a workspace variable After selecting this option in any of the dialogs, the experience of selecting a Variable from a library will appear. Figure: The select variable dialog invoked from within a Dataflow Gen2 Be sure to test this improved experience and share your feedback. Learn more: Use Fabric variable libraries in Dataflow Gen2 (Preview) - Microsoft Fabric New data destinations Dataflow Gen2 continues to expand where curated data can land, supporting both lake‑first architectures and hybrid data estates. With new and updated destinations, teams can publish transformed outputs in the formats and platforms that best fit their downstream consumers—whether that’s open lake storage, lakehouse files, enterprise warehouses, or business‑friendly file formats. Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (Generally Available) Dataflow Gen2 now supports Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS Gen2) allowing teams to land curated outputs directly into their data lake using open formats and folder structures aligned to organizational standards. This enables lake‑first ingestion patterns for organizations that treat ADLS as their system of record, while still authoring transformations using low‑code Dataflow Gen2 experiences. Common scenarios include reusing curated outputs across Fabric (Spark and SQL) as well as external systems that are read directly from Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2. Figure: ADLS gen2 destination option Lakehouse files (Generally Available) Dataflow Gen2 can write outputs directly into the Files area of a Fabric lakehouse. This is useful when downstream consumers expect file‑based outputs rather than tables, or when teams need to align with existing folder and file conventions inside the lakehouse. This enables patterns where transformed extracts are consumed by Spark notebooks, pipelines, or external tools, while also supporting hybrid designs where some Dataflow outputs are tables and others are files within the same Fabric workspace. Figure: Lakehouse files option Snowflake databases (Preview) This enables transformed outputs to be published directly into Snowflake databases as part of Fabric‑based, low‑code transformation workflows. This supports hybrid data estates where Fabric is used for transformation while Snowflake remains the target platform for analytics or data sharing. This preview helps standardize transformations across platforms and enables analysts to departments to publish governed outputs into Snowflake without duplicating transformation logic. Figure: Snowflake destination option Excel files (Preview) Dataflow Gen2 is introducing the ability to write outputs as Excel files (Preview) for supported filesystem destinations such as SharePoint and ADLS Gen2. This makes it easier to support business processes that still rely on Excel, while keeping transformation logic centralized and governed in Fabric. Typical scenarios include publishing refreshed Excel extracts for operational reporting or legacy workflows, and standardizing Excel output formatting from a single Dataflow definition. Schema support in Fabric data destinations (Generally Available) As Dataflow Gen2 adoption grows, many teams run into organizational challenges when publishing tables into shared destinations. Without schema control, teams often resort to creating separate databases, warehouses, or lakehouses just to keep tables logically grouped—adding complexity and making collaboration harder. With this release, Dataflow Gen2 data destinations now support writing into specific schemas (where applicable). This capability is now generally available for destinations such as Fabric SQL databases, Lakehouses, and Warehouses, giving teams more control over how Dataflow outputs are structured and governed. What’s improved Better organization without extra destinations: Teams can organize tables by domain—such as finance, sales, or HR—using schemas instead of creating separate destinations for each area. This keeps environments cleaner while still enforcing logical separation. Smoother collaboration in shared environments: Multiple teams can publish tables into the same warehouse or SQL database while maintaining clear ownership and structure through schemas. This reduces naming conflicts and supports shared analytics models without friction. Figure: The connection settings for the Warehouse connector using the advanced options to set the Navigate using full hierarchy to true By aligning Dataflow Gen2 outputs with enterprise schema conventions, this enhancement makes it easier to support multiteam data platforms, improve governance, and scale Dataflow Gen2 usage across the organization without restructuring existing destinations. Learn more: Dataflow Gen2 data destinations and managed settings - Microsoft Fabric AI-Powered Prompt Transform (Generally Available) Fabric AI Prompt is integrating generative AI features into the low-code data transformation process. Authors can enrich and transform data using natural language prompts without building or managing machine learning models, while staying within the Dataflow Gen2 execution model. The AI Prompt capability is accessed from the Add column experience, where authors define a prompt and select columns to provide contextual input. This allows AI-driven enrichment to be expressed inline alongside existing Power Query transformations, keeping logic centralized and auditable. Figure: The AI Prompt dialog in Dataflow Gen2 Moving forward, all operations associated to the usage of AI Prompt within Dataflow Gen2 will be accounted towards an explicit AI meter with the operation name of “AI Functions”. Learn more: Fabric AI Prompt in Dataflow Gen2 (Preview) - Microsoft Fabric Publish experience UX + performance improvements (parallelized query validations) Publishing complex Dataflow Gen2 items can be time‑consuming, especially when dataflows contain many queries or multiple destinations. In these cases, validations are required before a dataflow can be published, and waiting for those checks to complete often slows down iteration and troubleshooting. With this release, we’ve improved the Dataflow Gen2 publish experience through a refreshed user interface and performance enhancements that parallelize query validations. By running validations concurrently, publish operations complete faster and surface issues earlier in the process. What’s improved Less time waiting: Dataflows with multiple queries and destinations publish faster, reducing idle time during validation and helping teams move through development and testing more efficiently. Clearer guidance during publication: Validation results are available sooner, making it easier to identify and resolve issues without repeated publish attempts or back‑and‑forth edits. Together, these improvements shorten the publish cycle, reduce friction when working with larger dataflows, and help teams iterate on Dataflow Gen2 solutions with more predictable and responsive feedback. Learn more: Dataflow Gen2 with CI/CD and Git integration. Save As Improvements: Scheduled Refresh Policies and Public APIs Save As continues to improve the migration experience to Dataflow Gen2 (CICD), especially for teams moving large numbers of dataflows across workspaces or tenants. One common challenge during migration is preserving refresh behavior—copied dataflows often require manual reconfiguration before they are production ready. With this release, Save As now supports Scheduled Refresh Policies for Dataflows Gen1, ensuring that refresh configurations are retained when copying a dataflow. This reduces post migration cleanup and helps teams move faster with fewer manual steps. In addition, we’re introducing a new public Save As API for Dataflows Gen1 designed for automation and bulk operations. This enables organizations to programmatically copy dataflows at scale, making it easier to support structured migration plans and repeatable rollout processes. What’s improved Streamlined refresh configurations: Dataflows created using Save As can now inherit scheduled refresh policies from the source dataflow, helping ensure consistent refresh behavior without re‑authoring schedules after migration. Automation at scale: The new Save As public API enables automated and bulk copy scenarios, allowing teams to migrate many Gen1 dataflows to Gen2 programmatically. This is particularly useful for multi‑workspace and multi‑tenant deployments where manual migration isn’t practical. Together, these enhancements reduce migration friction, minimize manual edits, and help teams adopt Dataflow Gen2 more efficiently—whether migrating a handful of dataflows or rolling out Gen2 at enterprise scale. Figure: Dialogs for the refresh and scheduling mechanism when using the Save as experience for Dataflow Gen2 Learn more: Save As Dataflow Gen2 documentation and public Save As API reference. SharePoint site picker in Modern Get Data and Data destinations (Preview) SharePoint Site Picker replaces manual URL entry with a browsable dropdown, so you can select the right SharePoint site directly instead of finding and pasting URLs Why this matters Eliminates manual URL copy-and-paste and context switching. Reduces connection errors caused by wrong URL formats. Surfaces Recent sites and Favorite sites instantly on dropdown open and enable you to search to find sites. Where the experience is available SharePoint site picker is available for SharePoint sources of Get Data in Dataflow Gen2, Pipelines, Copy Job, and Lakehouse shortcuts, and as a destination in Dataflow Gen2. How to use SharePoint Site Picker Simplified SharePoint Site Selection: Instead of copying URLs manually, use the Site URL dropdown to choose from Recent sites and Favorite sites. Figure: SharePoint Site Picker dropdown Quick Search Capability: Find related sites faster by typing in the dropdown search box. Once you select a site, you can load data into the Power Query editor for transformation. Figure: SharePoint Site Picker searched for results Learn more about SharePoint folder connector, SharePoint list connector, and SharePoint online list. Diagnostics download (Preview) Dataflow Gen2 diagnostics download provides a simple way to collect logs and diagnostic artifacts for both cloud-based and VNET gateway dataflows. Instead of rerunning refreshes or guessing at failures, you can download the information needed to investigate issues directly. This helps teams fail faster and fix issues sooner. Downloadable diagnostics make it easier to identify refresh failures, performance bottlenecks, and connectivity problems, including complex networking scenarios that rely on VNET data gateways. Figure: The recent runs dialog showing the new button at the bottom left of the dialog to Download detailed logs With clearer signals available upfront, support investigations are shorter and operational friction is reduced. Learn more: An overview of refresh history and monitoring for dataflows. Advanced Edit for destinations (Preview) The new Advanced Edit experience for Data Destinations enables editing of the underlying M logic that configures destination settings. This unlocks deeper customization, including the ability to leverage parameters to drive destination behavior—an important step for teams standardizing deployments across environments. Parameter-driven destinations: switch target schema/table, file paths, or naming conventions without rewriting queries. Unblock advanced scenarios that require destination settings not yet available in the simplified UI. Figure: The new Advanced editor for data destinations Learn more: Advanced edit for data destination queries in Dataflow Gen2 - Microsoft Fabric. Data destination validations during publish (Preview) Dataflow Gen2 now validates data destinations during publication, helping catch common issues earlier in the development cycle. These validations surface problems such as missing permissions, invalid destination settings, or naming conflicts before the first refresh runs. By shifting these checks to publish time, authors get clear, actionable errors sooner—when changes are easiest to fix. This shortens the feedback loop and reduces time spent troubleshooting runtime refresh failures after deployment. For creators, earlier validation means fewer broken dataflows entering production. This reduces operational noise, minimizes rework, and helps ensure that published dataflows are refresh ready and more stable by default. Learn more: Dataflow Gen2 data destinations validation rules. Evaluate query API (Preview) The Execute Query API (Preview) enables on-demand execution of Power Query logic in Dataflow Gen2 scenarios—without requiring a full scheduled refresh cycle. It’s designed for cases where you need to trigger transformations programmatically (or in response to events) and retrieve results quickly for downstream processing. Event-driven pipelines: run a transformation when new data arrives and push outputs to a destination or consumer immediately. Streaming and near-real-time scenarios: execute queries more frequently than a typical scheduled refresh to support operational dashboards and alerting workflows. Automation at scale: integrate with orchestration tools and scripts to run specific queries as part of broader ETL/ELT jobs. Faster debugging: re-run targeted queries to validate fixes without republishing the entire dataflow. Learn more: Execute Query API (Streaming) documentation (Preview). Data Factory Data Factory MCP (Preview) Dataflow Gen2 offers a suite of pipeline functions, including dataflow creation, M (Power Query) scripting, connection management, query execution, and refresh coordination. These tools are directly accessible to AI assistants. Access is available through platforms such as VS Code, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or via the command line. Why it matters AI assistants create, test, and deploy dataflows through natural language—no browser tabs or manual configuration required. Iterative M development via execute_query lets the AI test transforms against live data before committing to a full refresh. MCP Apps provide guided UI forms (connection setup, gateway selection) inside the chat panel. Open source (GitHub), ships as a NuGet package, runs locally—credentials never leave your machine. Learn more: Data Factory GitHub repo. IBM Netezza ODBC Driver (Generally Available) As we move away from using the embedded Simba driver, customers now have a more dependable and supported option by using their own Netezza driver. This update ensures continued connectivity, long-term support, and a more future-ready experience for organizations using the Netezza connector. Customers do not need to install the new connector; you may reuse your existing connector but will need to install the new IBM Netezza ODBC driver. Figure: IBM Netezza Connector Selection in Fabric UI Reference the IBM Netezza ODBC documentation for more information Google BigQuery connector (Generally Available) This update reflects a shift to the newer GBQ connector as the supported, long-term path forward, providing customers with improved reliability, and alignment with our evolving security standards. With this update, customers can use a connector designed for durability, compliance, and future enhancements. Figure: Google BigQuery Connector in Fabric UI Additional details are available in the Google BigQuery connector documentation. QuickBooks Online connector retirement The QuickBooks Online connector is being retired and will no longer be supported as of March 2026. As part of our ongoing platform evolution, this change streamlines our connector portfolio and ensures our continued commitment to only the highest level of secure data connectivity. After retirement, customers will no longer be able to create new connections, and existing connections may no longer function. Lakehouse Maintenance activity in Fabric Pipelines (Preview) Keeping your Lakehouse healthy shouldn’t require a long checklist or manual scripts. The new Lakehouse Maintenance activity (Preview) makes it easy to automate common upkeep tasks directly inside Fabric Data Factory pipelines. Figure: The Lakehouse maintenance activity in Fabric pipelines With this activity, you can schedule and run actions like vacuuming old files, optimizing table layouts, and managing storage—all in a repeatable, governed workflow. It’s a simple way to keep performance high and storage costs in check, especially for teams managing large or fast‑growing datasets. Figure: The Lakehouse maintenance activity settings Whether you run maintenance nightly or as part of a broader DataOps process, this activity helps support reliable Lakehouse operations. Check out our Lakehouse Maintenance documentation. Refresh SQL endpoint activity in Fabric pipelines (Preview) The process of keeping your SQL analytics layer current is now simpler. The new Refresh SQL endpoint activity (Preview) lets you refresh your Lakehouse SQL endpoint on-demand or as part of your pipeline orchestration. Figure: The Refresh SQL endpoint activity You can trigger targeted refreshes after data ingestion, run coordinated refreshes alongside your transformations, or ensure downstream consumers always see the latest state. It’s built for operational consistency – especially for BI, reporting, and real‑time analytics scenarios that rely on predictable SQL performance. Figure: The Refresh SQL Endpoint activity settings. This activity gives you more control, less manual overhead, and a smoother end‑to‑end refresh experience. Check out the RSQL documentation for more details. Generate Pipeline expressions with Copilot (Generally Available) Writing expressions doesn't have to be time-consuming; simply describe your needs in natural language, and Copilot will generate pipeline expressions for you. Figure: Generate Pipeline expressions with Copilot Whether it’s building dynamic folder paths, conditional logic, string parsing, or parameterized values, Copilot now handles the expression authoring for you. This feature removes friction for both new users and power users – saving time, reducing errors, and making expression logic easier to understand. Workspace monitoring for Fabric Data Factory’s pipelines and Copy job (Preview) Operational observability continues to evolve in Fabric. We’re taking the first major step toward workspace‑level observability in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory. Until now, understanding how pipelines and copy jobs behave at scale often meant inspecting individual runs via Monitoring Hub. With the introduction of workspace monitoring (Preview), Data Factory begins a shift to a workspace‑wide view of operational health. The newest workspace monitoring updates bring clearer visibility and faster troubleshooting across your pipeline ecosystem. What’s available A workspace-wide view of item-level runs Rich filtering, sorting, and drilldown Insight into failure patterns, duration trends, and operational health Faster navigation—no need to click into each pipeline This gives DataOps teams a unified lens to understand performance and diagnose issues quickly. Figure: A view of your pipelines and Copy jobs within the workspace monitoring solution Coming Soon Activity-level L2 monitoring for pipelines. Copy job L2-level monitoring (Preview) for deeper insights and debugging. These improvements continue building toward a more comprehensive, intuitive monitoring experience for production workloads. Check out our docs on Enable Workspace Monitoring in Microsoft Fabric and Workspace Monitoring for Copy Job in Microsoft Fabric for more information on how to use this experience. Interval-based schedules The latest enhancement to Fabric Data Factory pipelines is the availability of interval-based schedules! This powerful new feature allows you to automate data workflows at regular non-overlapping intervals, like the popular tumbling window trigger in Azure Data Factory. Figure: Interval-based schedule configuration in Fabric Data Factory With interval-based scheduling, you can easily configure recurring pipeline runs that ensure timely data processing and seamless integration across your architecture. New Airflow APIs New Airflow Operators Apache Airflow jobs in Fabric Data Factory facilitate the execution of a wide range of Fabric artifacts through native operator integration. Users can run artifacts such as Notebooks, Spark job definitions, Pipelines, Semantic Models, and user data functions directly from their DAGs. Apache Airflow jobs now provide support for executing Copy jobs and dbt jobs! Figure: Airflow operators for Fabric items, including Copy job and dbt job execution To learn more, refer to Run a Fabric item using Apache Airflow DAG. PowerShell model for gateways (Generally Available) The PowerShell model for gateways now delivers fully supported, production-ready automation for gateway lifecycle, update, restore, and configuration management. This release introduces new commands for version discovery and upgrade control, along with reliability and usability improvements that make large-scale, script-driven gateway operations easier and more robust. Figure: Using the Gateway PowerShell module to manage gateway operations from the command line Learn more through the gateway PowerShell documentation and cmdlet reference on Microsoft Learn. Certificate and proxy support for VNet data gateway (Generally Available) Certificate and proxy support for VNet data gateway enables secure, compliant connectivity in enterprise environments. Organizations can use enterprise-issued certificates for gateway authentication and configure proxy routing when direct internet access is restricted. Together, these capabilities strengthen security, support corporate network policies, and expand deployment flexibility in controlled and regulated infrastructures. nshot_of_certificate_and_proxy_settings_for_a_Virtual_Network_Data_Gateway Figure: Configure certificate authentication and proxy for a Virtual Network Data Gateway Learn more through Manage virtual network (VNet) data gateways. Virtual network data gateway supports up to nine instances This update enables greater scalability and higher throughput for enterprise workloads. With expanded instance capacity, organizations can handle increased data movement and processing demands, improve parallel job performance, and enhance reliability for mission-critical tasks. This update provides more flexibility to scale gateway infrastructure in line with growing business needs. Figure: Virtual Network Data Gateway now supports scaling up to nine instances per cluster Learn more What is a virtual network (VNet) data gateway. SSIS Pipeline Activity (Preview) SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) has been a cornerstone of enterprise data integration for decades, powering mission-critical ETL workloads across thousands of organizations worldwide. Invoke SSIS Package activity in Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric (Preview), provides the power of your existing SSIS investments directly into Fabric's unified SaaS analytics platform. Figure: Add an Invoke SSIS Package activity Many enterprises have significant investments in SSIS packages that orchestrate complex ETL workflows across on-premises databases, file systems, and cloud services. Until now, running these packages required either an on-premises SQL Server, or the Azure-SSIS Integration Runtime in Azure Data Factory. Both options meant managing additional infrastructure and staying outside the Fabric ecosystem. Figure: Invoke SSIS package activity configuration But the Invoke SSIS Package pipeline activity in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory changes this. It allows you to execute your existing SSIS packages directly from a Fabric pipeline, enabling true lift-and-shift of legacy ETL workloads into Fabric—no package rewrite required. There is no need for integration of runtime management or stopping and starting IRs; simply incorporate them into your pipeline. Seamlessly upgrade Azure Data Factory and Synapse pipelines to Microsoft Fabric (Preview) Microsoft Fabric Data Factory now offers a guided (Preview) migration experience to help you move existing Azure Data Factory (ADF) and Azure Synapse Analytics pipelines into Fabric—starting with an assessment-first approach so you can migrate intentionally and validate before switching production workloads. Review readiness and plan next steps: The assessment categorizes pipelines and activities so you can decide what to migrate now vs. what to fix or defer. You can also export results to CSV for offline review and remediation planning. Figure: Review pipeline and activity readiness results in Azure Data Factory (ADF only) Mount your factory to Fabric For Azure Data Factory migrations, you’ll mount your ADF into a Fabric workspace and then continue the remaining steps inside Fabric. Figure: Continue the migration flow in Fabric after mounting Migrate selected pipelines in Fabric In Fabric Data Factory, open the mounted factory (ADF) or chosen workspace (Synapse), then migrate the pipelines you want to migrate. Map linked services to Fabric connections and complete migration During migration, you’ll map ADF/Synapse linked services to Fabric connections. For guidance on creating and managing connections in Fabric, refer to Data source management. Figure: Map Linked Services to Fabric Connections Validate and promote After migration, validate connections and credentials, run end-to-end tests, and then re-enable triggers as needed. Pipelines migrate safely, with triggers disabled by default so you stay in control of execution. Learn more: Upgrade your Azure Data Factory pipelines to Fabric. Data Factory—Mirroring Mirroring for SAP (Generally Available) Built on top of SAP Datasphere’s Premium Outbound Integration, mirroring for SAP seamlessly integrates Fabric’s advanced mirroring engine with SAP Datasphere’s replication flows, unlocking connectivity through SAP’s native data extraction technologies. This means direct access to the full suite of SAP applications—whether it’s SAP S/4HANA (on-premises or cloud), SAP ECC, SAP BW, SAP BW/4HANA, or cloud solutions like SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Ariba, and SAP Concur. Mirroring capabilities allow you to: Eliminate data silos by bringing SAP data alongside other enterprise sources in OneLake. Maintain end-to-end data lineage and governance for compliance and auditability. Accelerate time-to-insight with near real-time data replication no custom ETL required. Figure: Mirrored database for SAP Learn more in Microsoft Fabric Mirrored Databases From SAP. Mirroring for Oracle databases (Generally Available) Mirroring for Oracle is now available in Microsoft Fabric, bringing a production‑ready, enterprise‑grade way to continuously replicate Oracle data into OneLake with no custom ETL pipelines. This milestone reflects strong validation from customers already running Mirroring for Oracle in production and marks a major step forward in Fabric’s zero‑ETL data integration strategy. With near real‑time data replication, customers can keep analytics, BI, and AI workloads continuously in sync with their operational Oracle systems. This release delivers improved stability, scale, and operational readiness, informed directly by customer feedback from public preview deployments. Mirroring for Oracle integrates natively with Fabric experiences like Power BI, Notebooks, and Lakehouses, enabling faster insights without disrupting existing Oracle workloads. As a fully supported capability, Mirroring for Oracle is now ready for broad enterprise adoption with long‑term investment from the Fabric platform team. Figure: Mirroring for Oracle creation steps Learn more at Mirroring for Oracle in Microsoft Fabric. Mirroring for Azure Database for MySQL (Preview) Mirrored databases now support Azure Database for MySQL. This capability enables you to directly replicate data from Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server into Fabric in near real time, ensuring that information remains current, readily query-able, and seamlessly integrated throughout the analytics stack without the need for traditional ETL processes. Mirrored MySQL data is managed alongside other data sources, facilitating cross-source querying, unified reporting, and comprehensive analytics. Figure: Screenshot of configuring a mirrored database for Azure Database for MySQL Learn more in Microsoft Fabric Mirrored Databases for MySQL. Mirroring for SharePoint List (Preview) Mirroring for SharePoint Lists enables continuous replication of SharePoint Lists and Document Libraries into OneLake without building custom ETL pipelines. This capability keeps SharePoint data automatically synchronized in near real time, ensuring analytics in Fabric stay aligned while SharePoint remains the system of record. When mirrored, both list tables and document library metadata land in OneLake in an analytics‑ready format, with document libraries replicated via shortcuts and converted into Delta Lake tables. Figure: Mirroring setup for a SharePoint list Fabric automatically creates a mirrored database and a read‑only SQL analytics endpoint, providing a rich analytical surface over the replicated data. As changes are made in SharePoint—such as new columns or updated rows—those updates flow continuously into Fabric, keeping schemas and data in sync. This public preview unlocks a simple, unified way to analyze SharePoint operational data across Fabric workloads including SQL, Power BI, notebooks, and data engineering experiences. Extended Capabilities in Mirroring: Change Delta Feed and Snowflake Mirroring Support for Views (Preview) Optional enhancements that build on core mirroring to support more advanced, real‑world analytics scenarios. These capabilities are designed for customers who need more than basic replication—enabling faster freshness, incremental processing, and business‑ready data without building or maintaining complex ETL pipelines. Including Change Data Feed (CDF), which captures inserts, updates, and deletes at a granular level and applies them incrementally into OneLake, allowing mirrored data to stay continuously fresh without full reloads. Extended Capabilities also include Mirroring Views for Snowflake (with support for other sources coming soon), which replicate logical views from the source system into OneLake so that source‑defined business logic—such as joins, filters, and transformations—can be preserved directly in Fabric. Together, CDF and Views enable incremental pipelines, near real‑time analytics, and shaped datasets that are immediately ready for consumption across Fabric workloads. Extended Capabilities are enabled during mirror setup and operate on top of core mirroring, allowing customers to selectively opt into advanced functionality as their analytics and AI needs grow. Billing will be available as part of these extended capabilities starting April 1, 2026. More details about these capabilities and billing can be found on our documentation: Extended Capabilities in Mirroring – Overview. Mirrored database now supports up to 1000 tables To meet growing business demands and improve scalability, mirrored databases now support up to 1000 tables, raised from the previous limit of 500. This enhancement significantly expands the scale of datasets that can be mirrored from the source database, enabling customers to bring more comprehensive data into Fabric without fragmentation, drive deeper analysis and scale the data solution to meet evolving requirements. Learn more in Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric. That’s a wrap! Publishing this update on the first day of FabCon feels especially meaningful. The features in this release reflect not just ongoing platform investment, but the ideas, feedback, and candid conversations we continue to have with the Fabric community—in sessions, online, and across preview programs. Thank you for showing up, sharing your experiences, and helping shape where Fabric goes next. We encourage you to explore these updates, ask questions, and tell us what’s working—whether that happens here at FabCon, in community forums, or through ongoing feedback channels. We’re grateful to be building Fabric alongside such an engaged community, and we’re excited to keep learning from you throughout FabCon and beyond.Retirement of Fabric data agent integration in Copilot in Power BI
Nearly a year ago, we announced the integration between Fabric data agent and Copilot in Power BI, allowing users to access a Fabric data agent directly from Copilot in Power BI. This integration enabled users to explore report data and interact with data agents within the same workflow. When you asked a question about your data, Copilot worked with you to understand your topic of interest, then used that context to identify the right data agent, along with other data sources, to answer from. We are retiring this integration Beginning August 26, 2026, the integration between Copilot in Power BI and Fabric data agents will be retired. Copilot in Power BI will no longer connect directly to Fabric data agents. After that date, users will no longer be able to ask Copilot in Power BI questions that are answered through a Fabric data agent. This change does not affect the Fabric data agent experience itself. Fabric data agents remain available through other supported experiences and continue to provide access to the data and capabilities through those experiences. Why we are making this change The Copilot in Power BI integration was built on the OpenAI Assistant API. As that API is being retired, we are retiring this integration as well. Rather than investing in a replacement for this specific integration, we are focusing on supported experiences that continue to provide access to Fabric data agents today. focusing on supported experiences that continue to provide access to Fabric data agents today. Where you can continue to use Fabric data agents Fabric data agents remain available through different supported experiences across the Microsoft ecosystem and beyond, including: Directly in the Fabric data agent experience Microsoft Foundry Microsoft Copilot Studio Microsoft 365 Copilot A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server endpoint, which enables integration with your own supported apps and tools. The underlying Fabric data agent remains unchanged by this retirement. Security controls and permissions continue to be enforced in accordance with the configuration and capabilities of the experience being used, including your data sources, security rules such as row level security and column level security, and permissions. Planning your transition If you currently access Fabric data agents through Copilot in Power BI, consider transitioning to one of the supported experiences previously listed. The most appropriate option will depend on how your organization uses Fabric data agents today and the workflows you want to support. For example, organizations already using Microsoft 365 Copilot may choose to access data agents there, while organizations building custom experiences may find Microsoft Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, or MCP-based integrations better aligned to their needs. Questions? Thank you for building with us and for your continued feedback. We remain committed to supporting Fabric data agents through supported experiences across the Microsoft ecosystem and beyond. If you have questions, please reach out and we will help you find the right fit.
Securing Outbound AI Connectivity in SQL Server 2025 (Generally Available)
AI is now part of the data layer SQL Server is evolving beyond a system that only stores and queries data. In SQL Server 2025, the engine can participate directly in AI-enabled workflows through governed integrations. Database-side workloads can connect to external AI services for scenarios such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where model outputs are grounded in authorized, enterprise data context. This shift helps organizations reduce custom middleware and ad- hoc integration paths while keeping governance, security, and access control closer to the data platform. For example, a financial institution analyzing suspicious transaction patterns can execute approved outbound AI calls under database governance instead of exporting sensitive data through scattered application services. However, that shift creates a valid security question: when SQL Server can reach external AI endpoints, how do you maintain control—especially for outbound connectivity to external AI services? SQL Server 2025 addresses this by extending its existing defense-in-depth model. AI connectivity is not treated as an exception path; it is enforced within SQL Server’s existing trust and control model. Why this matters Many teams adopted AI by pushing sensitive data out of the database into application code or integration services. That approach often leads to three issues: Data moves more than necessary. Security policy becomes inconsistent and fragmented across systems. Audit trails are more challenging to correlate. SQL Server 2025 supports a more controlled operating model. AI integration can happen closer to the data, under database governance, while still enabling modern AI scenarios. This approach reduces unnecessary data movement while preserving existing application patterns. This benefits security, platform, and engineering teams by simplifying control and reducing fragmentation. Strong controls over external connectivity SQL Server 2025 supports outbound AI connectivity through features such as direct REST invocation and external model objects. Both rely on explicit SQL Server permissions and approved authentication, but the controls apply differently depending on the feature. External REST invocation uses sys.sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint to call approved HTTPS endpoints from T-SQL. External model registration uses CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL to define model objects for embedding and vector search scenarios. The shared security idea is simple: define what can be used, grant only the required permissions, and authenticate access with approved credentials or identities. Enablement applies to REST invocation, which must be turned on before use. Permissions control who can enable REST calls, create or alter model objects, and execute approved operations. Authentication determines which credential, identity, or secret is used when SQL Server reaches an external service. For sys.sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint, SQL Server provides a direct way to invoke HTTPS REST endpoints. The feature is disabled by default in SQL Server 2025 and must be enabled through sp_configure. Changing that setting requires ALTER SETTINGS server permission (implicitly held by sysadmin and serveradmin), which keeps enablement under administrative control. After REST invocation is enabled, runtime use still depends on permissions, endpoint policy, and credential handling, including EXECUTE ANY EXTERNAL ENDPOINT for callers. Organizations should grant invocation rights only to required principals, restrict allowed destinations, and require authenticated requests. Depending on the target service, authentication can use managed identity, certificates, API keys, or other supported mechanisms. For CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL, SQL Server creates a database object that stores the model endpoint, authentication method, and model purpose. Creating or changing that object requires CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL or ALTER ANY EXTERNAL MODEL, while using it requires EXECUTE on the model. This makes model access explicit without implying it uses the same enablement switch as REST invocation. The result is a clearer security boundary: REST calls require explicit enablement and controlled invocation, while external models require governed object creation and execution. In both cases, least privilege, approved authentication, and auditability remain central. High-privilege access is still the real security boundary AI features do not change the core rule of SQL Server security: the real boundary is who has permission to do what. When privileges are tightly scoped, features remain safe to adopt. That’s why least privilege matters. Users and applications should have only the permissions they need for their specific tasks. Nothing more. In practice, this means: Avoid broad administrative role membership wherever possible. Grant only the minimum permission required for the specific operation. Separate operational roles (configuration, model management, invocation). Review role assignments and grants on a defined cadence. Remove stale access quickly after ownership changes. Strong security is not about blocking capabilities. It is about controlling who can use them, when they can use them, and under what conditions, while integrating with existing governance processes. Visibility and accountability are built in Prevention is only one part of security. Detection and response matter just as much. Because these operations execute through SQL Server interface, they can be observed with established SQL monitoring and auditing patterns, including SQL Server Audit and Extended Events. That helps teams answer operational questions such as: Who enabled external connectivity? Which principal invoked an external endpoint? Which external model object was executed? When did behavior deviate from baseline? Governed SQL-side AI execution can improve both incident response and audit readiness. By centralizing execution and logging, organizations can more easily collect, trace, and explain evidence when investigating incidents or responding to compliance reviews. Architecture still determines risk Traditional AI patterns often move data out of SQL Server into other runtime layers before calling external models. This increases the attack surface and fragments policy enforcement. SQL Server 2025 enables a different operating model: Keep data closer to where governance already exists. Use explicit model and endpoint objects with permission checks. Apply outbound network controls and endpoint allow patterns. Centralize audit trails for security and compliance review. In addition, network connectivity and SQL permissions alone should not be the final security boundary. External AI endpoints should also enforce independent authorization decisions, such as RBAC, allowing access only to approved managed identities. This creates an additional layer of protection and helps limit the impact of credential misuse or configuration errors. Secure usage best practices Use this checklist before production rollout: Enable only the connectivity features required for the scenario. Grant least privilege for configuration, model management, and invocation. Restrict outbound traffic to approved destinations. Use managed identities where supported; otherwise use centrally managed, least-privilege credentials. Enforce endpoint-side authorization and RBAC controls for service identities and credentials. Audit configuration changes and invocation activity. Establish behavioral baselines and alert on deviations. Run periodic access and configuration reviews. Include incident response runbooks for external AI call paths. These practices align with standard SQL security guidance and are not unique to AI features. Most control failures come from weak operating discipline around the feature. Strong defaults help, but repeatable processes are what keep systems safe over time. Next Steps Review permission design for AI connectivity operations in a non-production environment. Define approved endpoint policy and outbound control requirements. Pilot one AI scenario with audit-first instrumentation. Document operational ownership for enablement, credential management, and monitoring. Get Started Refer to sp_invoke_external_rest_endpoint, apply the recommended risk-mitigation controls for unauthorized access and data transfer, then validate your CREATE EXTERNAL MODEL permissions in a dev environment using the best practices checklist above, and finalize your SQL Server Database Engine permission design before production rollout.Build agent with AI for Data Agent (Preview)
Configuring a Data Agent can be challenging. To deliver reliable answers, authors must understand the data model, identify the right tables and relationships, write clear instructions, create representative examples, and test the agent until it meets user expectations. This process can require hours of schema review, prompt refinement, and manual validation. Build agent with AI in Data Agent is an AI-powered assistant that simplifies how creators build, configure, and refine Data Agents. Creators can use it to set up a Data Agent or improve one that does not return the expected answers. The assistant replaces manual testing with guided, conversational configuration. The challenge: configuring Data Agent can be difficult Data Agents in Microsoft Fabric enable business users to ask natural-language questions about organizational data. Reliable answers depend on defined agent instructions, data source instructions, descriptions, and example queries. These configurations teach the agent how to reason over the data. Getting these configurations right has historically meant: Manually exploring schemas to understand table relationships and join paths. Writing and rewriting instructions through repeated testing cycles. Crafting example queries from scratch without visibility into what patterns work. Guessing at the right level of specificity for instructions. Identifying and resolving conflicts across configurations. For example, when an example query implies different business logic than the agent instructions. Build agent with AI changes that. What is build agent with AI? Open build agent with AI by selecting “Build agent with AI” on the Data Agent ribbon. Explore your data, generate configurations, validate them against real data, and apply updates without leaving the Data Agent experience. Think of build agent with AI as an expert partner that understands your schema, learns from your data patterns, and helps you define the rules your Data Agent needs to deliver accurate answers. Key capabilities 1. Schema exploration: Understand your data in minutes, not hours Instead of manually navigating table definitions, simply ask Build agent with AI to explore your connected data sources. It will summarize key entities, identify likely join paths, surface important columns, and recommend the fields most relevant to the questions you want your Data Agent to answer. Example prompts: "Explore the schema and tell me which tables are relevant for sales pipeline reporting." "What columns should I use to join customers to orders?" "Show me the key date fields and how they're used across tables." 2. Query history exploration: Learn from what already works Build Agent with AI can analyze patterns from previously executed queries including common joins, filters, and aggregation logic. It uses these insights to recommend better example queries and more precise data source instructions. Instead of starting from a blank page, you build proven patterns. Example prompts: "Look at recent query patterns for churn and suggest a few representative examples." "Find common joins between factSales and dimension tables and summarize the join keys." "Are there standard filters we always apply for active customers?" 3. Generate instructions and example queries: From exploration to configuration in one step This is where Build agents with AI truly shine. Based on your conversation, schema exploration, and query history, it generates the configuration that drive Data Agent quality: Agent Instructions: High-level rules governing how the Data Agent reasons and selects data sources Data Source Instructions: Detailed guidance on tables, columns, joins, and data modeling within a source Data Source Descriptions: Summaries of what each source contains and how it's organized Example Queries: Natural-language questions paired with queries that capture your business logic Example prompts: "Generate data source instructions so the agent uses the correct join keys and date grain." "Suggest five example queries for the most common questions about revenue and returns." "Rewrite my current agent instructions to be clearer and remove ambiguity." You review every proposed change before it's applied. The assistant suggests that you decide. 4. Execute and validate queries: Confidence before you commit Before applying any configuration changes, use Build agent with AI to run read-only queries against your actual data. Confirm that join paths work, verify data availability, and ensure example queries return the expected results. Example prompts: "Run a sample query to verify the join between dimCustomer and factSales." "Test the query you proposed and adjust it if it returns duplicates." Note: Only read-only operations are supported, your data is always safe. A simple, iterative workflow The most successful Data Agent setups follow a natural loop: Explore tables, columns, and relationships in your data source. Learn and surface proven patterns from query history.. Generate instructions and example queries tailored to your business questions Validate by executing queries against real data to test and refine. Apply updates and switch to Test mode to validate end-to-end. Repeat as needed. Each cycle tightens the feedback loop between configuration and results. Supported data sources Build agent with AI works with SQL and Eventhouse data sources in this preview, including: Lakehouse (SQL analytics endpoint) Warehouse Mirrored Database SQL Database Eventhouse You can attach multiple data sources, but all must be supported types. Getting started Create a Data Agent and add a supported data source with the relevant tables selected Select "Build agent with AI" in the Data Agent ribbon to open Build agent with AI Start a conversation by describing what you're building or ask a question you want your Data Agent to handle Iterate to explore, generate, validate, and apply configurations through natural conversation Switch to Test mode to validate your Data Agent with real questions No additional setup or configuration is required. What's next Try Build Agent with AI today and experience a faster, more intuitive way to build Data Agents that truly understand your data. Use the Fabric Community or your Microsoft account team to share feedback about the build agent with AI preview. To continue, see About Data Agent in Microsoft Fabric, review Data Agent configurations, and open the build agent with AI documentation.
Bringing Power BI Insights to Every Copilot User
The future of Power BI and Copilot starts by meeting users where they already work. We’re bringing trusted Power BI answers into Microsoft 365 Copilot first, so people can ask questions of governed business data in the flow of work — then carrying that richer, more conversational experience back into the Power BI service itself.
