Power BI September 2026 Feature Summary
As the Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, data, and analytics community gathers in Barcelona for the European Microsoft Fabric + SQL Community Conference, this month is packed with news. From new Copilot and AI experiences to reporting, modeling, data connectivity, developer enhancements, and mobile updates, we're sharing the latest innovations designed to help you build, analyze, and act on your data more effectively. Whether you're joining us in person or following along from afar, this roundup is your guide to everything new across Power BI this month. 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 using versions of Power BI Desktop from March 2026 or earlier will no longer be able to save and share Power BI files to OneDrive and SharePoint. Please ensure you update Power BI Desktop to keep using this functionality. Copilot and AI Power BI Agentic Experiences (Generally Available) Agentic development in Power BI is real, and it is already delivering value: whether you are starting from scratch with greenfield projects or building upon existing solutions in brownfield scenarios, BI developers can delegate the work to an agent, review the result, and refine it rather than starting from scratch every time. What makes this work is tools and context. Through Work IQ and Fabric IQ, the agent grounds its work in your business context—your data, your semantics, and the way your organization operates. Through skills—published by Microsoft in skills-for-fabric, shared by the community, or personalized by your own team—it also picks up your development context: the modeling and reporting practices, conventions, and workflows your team expects. Through tools such as the Power BI Authoring MCP server and the Power BI Desktop Bridge CLI, the agent can act on that context: reading and changing semantic models and reports directly, reloading its edits in Power BI tools, and reviewing its own work. Point an agent at a requirements document or a screenshot of the layout you want, describe what you need, and the agent can help accelerate the initial authoring pass, which you can then review and refine. rt authoring skills. What's available today The powerbi-authoring plugin in microsoft/skills-for-fabric bundling the semantic modeling and reporting agent skills and tools. It was recently updated to support report authoring for remote semantic models in Power BI service and an expanded range of supported report visuals, including custom visuals. To learn more, refer to the Power BI skills documentation. The local Power BI Authoring MCP server allows the agent to edit semantic models in Power BI Desktop. To learn more, refer to the Power BI Authoring MCP documentation. Power BI Desktop Bridge lets an agent reload changes in a running instance of Power BI Desktop and capture screenshots to check its own work. To learn more, refer to the Power BI Desktop Bridge documentation. Browser-based validation for remote report editing, so the agent can validate a report using a headless browser (an automated browser that runs without a visible user interface). Removing the local Power BI Desktop dependency allows the full authoring loop to run without Power BI Desktop, extending the agentic experience to Mac users and others who do not rely on a local installation. To learn more and get started, refer to the Power BI agentic documentation. Microsoft 365 Copilot is coming to Power BI (Preview) Copilot experiences have emerged across the applications people use every day, bringing AI closer to the work happening in each product. But this can also feel fragmented, with different entry points, separate conversations, and uncertainty about which Copilot agent to use. Our goal is to create a consistent Copilot experience that is available wherever people work. People should not have to leave the application they are using to find it. Microsoft 365 Copilot should be available within their experience, carry relevant context across experiences, and connect to the specialized intelligence of each product. We’re taking an important step toward that goal with a preview of Microsoft 365 Copilot integrated directly into Power BI and Microsoft Fabric. This integration gives users a familiar place to bring together business context and trusted data. Shared conversation history lets them continue a discussion as they move between Microsoft 365 Copilot experiences instead of starting over in each application. ower BI experience, including integration with Work IQ. In Power BI, a question no longer has to stop with the numbers in a report. A sales leader could use Fabric IQ to identify which regions are behind plan, then use Work IQ to connect the results with customer emails, meetings, account plans, and documents. They could summarize the complete picture and even kick off actions and tasks in Cowork, all from inside Power BI. This work context and ability to move directly from insight to action were not available in the standalone Power BI Copilot experience. the Cowork integration into the Power BI experience, highlighting the full Microsoft 365 experience embedded into Power BI. A new setting in the Fabric admin portal will determine whether this integration is available by enabling or disabling its entry point in the navigation pane. It will be off by default, giving administrators time to evaluate the experience before introducing it to their organization. Administrators can enable it when they are ready and disable it if they need to pause access. This setting is independent of the existing setting for standalone Power BI Copilot. If both settings are enabled, users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license will see entry points for both experiences, and standalone Power BI Copilot will continue to appear on Home. If standalone Power BI Copilot is disabled and Microsoft 365 Copilot is enabled, users will see only the Microsoft 365 Copilot entry point. During the initial preview, the integrated experience is available only to users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. These users receive the full Copilot Chat experience in Power BI and Fabric, bringing together Fabric data through Fabric IQ and relevant Microsoft 365 context through Work IQ. Existing permissions and governance controls continue to determine which content each user can access. Support for a broader Fabric audience will follow. This expansion will give Fabric users without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license access to an integrated Copilot experience tailored to their available capabilities. The experience may differ from the full licensed offering, but it will extend Fabric IQ and conversational data experiences to more types of Fabric users. The preview will roll out with the setting turned off by default, with administrators choosing when to enable it for their organization. This is an important step toward one Copilot that meets people wherever they work, connecting the context surrounding each decision with trusted business data. To learn more, refer to the Copilot in Power BI documentation. Power BI data answers in Microsoft Copilot Chat (Generally Available) Users can find and ask questions about Power BI reports and semantic models directly from Microsoft 365 Copilot. They can search for relevant Power BI content, attach a report or provide a link, and ask questions in natural language. Powered by Fabric IQ, the experience uses the data, measures, relationships, and business logic already defined in Power BI to provide grounded answers. Users can also bring Power BI insights into conversations that include their Microsoft 365 work context, such as emails, meetings, and documents. Microsoft 365 Copilot now supports Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies and information protection controls for this experience. This helps organizations adopt conversational analytics while applying their existing policies for identifying, classifying, and protecting sensitive data. The experience continues to respect existing Power BI permissions and Microsoft 365 governance controls. Users can only access Power BI content they are authorized to view, and administrators retain control over whether Fabric data is available in Microsoft 365 Copilot. Organizations can use Power BI data answering in Microsoft 365 Copilot with production support and service commitments. This milestone makes it easier for users to bring trusted business data into the flow of work without leaving Microsoft 365 Copilot or creating a separate agent. To learn more, refer to the Fabric IQ in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat (Frontier) documentation. Fabric IQ Plugin in Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork (Generally Available) Power BI data is available where multi-step work happens, so a business question, the analysis behind it, and the follow-up it triggers stay in one place. To ground a task in Power BI, users can search for relevant content, attach a report, or paste a link to a report or semantic model. Questions are answered using the data, measures, relationships, and business logic already defined in the semantic model. Coverage now extends to reports published through organizational apps, with improvements to content discovery, large model handling, schema selection, Verified Answers, and row-level value search. The plugin also carries forward the governance controls organizations rely on in Power BI: Existing access controls: Power BI permissions and row-level security determine which reports and semantic models each user can reach. Citations and sensitivity labels: Responses cite the Power BI content behind an answer and surface the Microsoft Purview Information Protection label applied to it, so users can see where a number came from and how it is classified. From insight to action: With Fabric IQ, users can analyze Power BI reports using natural language, uncover key findings, and put those findings to work right away in Cowork. Whether they are summarizing business performance, investigating a trend, or answering a data question, Fabric IQ turns trusted organizational data into outcomes. To learn more about supported scenarios, setup, and current considerations, refer to the Fabric IQ in Microsoft 365 Copilot Cowork documentation. For licensing and pricing information, refer to Microsoft 365 Copilot plans and pricing. Build Fabric Apps more easily in GitHub Copilot App (Preview) Fabric Apps were introduced in June as an AI-first way to build custom web apps with Microsoft Fabric as the backend. This month we’re excited to share that building these Fabric Apps on your governed data has become even easier with the GitHub Copilot App, which gives you a natural language chat interface instead of a command-line interface. . To try it out, start by downloading the GitHub Copilot App. Then navigate to Customize > Plugins > Rayfin, and select Install to enable our dedicated plugin: Rayfin plugin in GitHub Copilot App. Once the plugin is enabled, simply start a new chat and work with Copilot to help plan your Fabric data app. After you review and approve the plan, ask the agent to execute it and specify the workspace where you want to deploy the app. . We look forward to seeing the amazing apps you build! Check out our community gallery for inspiration. Enhanced Report Consumption Copilot with Fabric IQ When viewing a Power BI report, you can enable Fabric IQ from the Copilot pane to better answer complex questions about your data. This enhancement merges existing Fabric IQ capabilities into Power BI Copilot report viewing mode, allowing Copilot to use a multi-step approach to evaluate data in the semantic model and refine its approach when generating a response. . With Fabric IQ enabled, Copilot can: Provide better answers to questions about your data based on detailed reasoning capabilities directly into the report viewing experience. Show reasoning steps to help you understand how Copilot provided an answer. Generate Fabric visuals to help you further analyze your data. Answers can include column, bar, stacked, line, area, pie, donut, scatter visuals. Provide the underlying DAX query and data table used to generate a response. . To learn more, refer to the Ask Copilot questions about your data documentation. New control for Copilot access to semantic models Power BI now provides semantic model editors with greater control over how Copilot can be used with their data. Users with write permissions can block read-only users from accessing a semantic model through Copilot and Microsoft’s remote MCP tools, supporting governance, compliance, and access-control requirements. The setting applies across Copilot experiences that query the semantic model, including Power BI Copilot experiences; Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and Cowork; and data agents, remote Fabric MCP servers, and Power BI MCP servers. When disabled, users with read-only access won't be able to access that semantic model through these experiences. By default, the setting remains enabled to preserve the current behavior. This setting appears in the Copilot section with the following description: “Allow any person with read-only access to use AI (i.e. Copilot, Microsoft’s MCP tools) on the model and its related reports.” Setting that allows people with read-only permission to use AI experiences with the semantic model and its related reports. This update gives organizations a clear and enforceable way to control AI access to semantic model data while maintaining flexibility for semantic model editors. To learn more, refer to the Use Copilot with Semantic Models in Power BI documentation. Remote Power BI Authoring MCP Server (Preview) The Power BI Authoring MCP enables AI applications to create and modify semantic models in Fabric workspaces, without installing or maintaining anything local. This release also unblocks Mac users that want to use the Power BI Authoring MCP, because the server runs remotely and does not require local binaries. Use the following endpoint in AI applications such as GitHub Copilot App: https://api.fabric.microsoft.com/v1/mcp/powerbi/authoring The local Power BI Authoring MCP server, released in November 2025, remains generally available. It remains an option when an agent needs to work with Power BI Desktop, Power BI Project (PBIP) or TMDL files on disk. The local and remote servers support the same authoring capabilities. We recommend using the remote server when local development is not required, such as when creating a Direct Lake semantic model in a Fabric workspace. In the following example, the AI agent uses one tool call to create a Direct Lake semantic model connected to a Fabric Lakehouse: To learn more, refer to the Power BI Authoring MCP server documentation. Reporting New Report Ribbon on the web (Preview) The Report ribbon is now available on the web, providing a consistent experience for report consumption and authoring that more closely matches Power BI Desktop. The ribbon organizes commands into clear, easy-to-navigate tabs, making it easier for users to discover features, interact with reports, and complete editing and authoring tasks directly in the browser. It also introduces the new Design ribbon and additional capabilities that were previously unavailable on the web, such as Format Painter. This milestone brings greater consistency to Power BI report-authoring experiences and marks an important step toward a seamless, end-to-end reporting workflow on the web. As web authoring capabilities continue to expand, users will be able to accomplish more of their reporting tasks directly in the browser, enabling a more streamlined, productive workflow. Enable the Try the new ribbon (preview) at the top of the page to explore the new experience. You can disable the setting to return to the previous ribbon. To learn more, refer to the Report Ribbon on the web documentation. Live Visual Sharing in Outlook on the web (Preview) For years, sharing data through email has been stagnant. You could send a screenshot, but it immediately became stale. You could attach a report link, but recipients had to leave their workflow to find the context they needed. And every follow-up question often meant another screenshot, another export, or another email thread. Now, we're bringing a new way to share Power BI insights directly in the flow of work with Live Visual Sharing in Outlook. With Live Visual Sharing, you can insert a Power BI visual into Outlook on the web and share it as a live, interactive experience. Recipients can view and interact with the visual directly in Outlook while staying connected to the latest underlying data. When a live visual is shared, Outlook renders an interactive version of the Power BI visual. Rather than embedding a static image, the experience remains connected to the source report and retrieves current data when viewed. Recipients can: Interact with the visual directly in Outlook on the web. Access tooltips and explore data points. See filters and slicers applied at the time of sharing. View refresh information and data context. Navigate back to the source report when deeper analysis is needed. The result is a richer conversation around data, directly within Outlook. Sharing a live visual is simple: Open a Power BI report in the service. Select a visual to share, then select More options in the upper-right corner. Select Share. Select Link to this visual. A pop-up will appear asking if you want to use the current view (apply existing filters and slicers) or not. After selecting Create Link, the link is copied to your clipboard. Open Outlook on the web. This experience is not available in the Outlook desktop app. Create a new email. Paste the link in the email. The visual renders in loop after a few seconds! You can also share the same link in a Loop page, and the visual will also be rendered. By combining Power BI, Outlook, and Loop-powered experiences, we're bringing data closer to where collaboration happens. Live Visual Sharing can support more informed, data-driven conversations in Outlook. To learn more about Live Visual Sharing in Outlook, refer to the Share live Power BI visuals documentation. More control and context in Power BI Home (Generally Available) Power BI Home now provides additional context and personalization options to help users discover the right content more efficiently. With new freshness indicators and customizable list views, you can quickly identify the most relevant reports and semantic models, prioritize the metadata that matters most, and tailor the experience to fit your workflow. Find the right content more easily Discover the right content more easily with new Data Refreshed and Modified Date columns in Power BI Home. By bringing the freshness signals already familiar from workspace list views into Home, users can more easily spot recently updated reports and semantic models, distinguish between similar items, and quickly find the content that matters most. Whether you're checking for the latest business updates or deciding which refreshed report to open, you can navigate with greater confidence and less guesswork. Customize your Home list view Not every user, team, or organization relies on the same signals to discover content. With Column Options, you can show or hide metadata, drag and reorder columns to prioritize the information you use most, and reset to the default view at any time. Whether you rely on freshness signals, endorsements, sensitivity labels, or location information, you can tailor Home to match your workflow. To learn more, refer to the Power BI Home documentation. Set and reset column widths in table and matrix (Generally Available) You can now right-click a column header in a table or matrix and select Set column width to specify its width in pixels. This option helps report viewers improve readability and fit the information they need within the available space, without changing the report author’s design or affecting other viewers. Changes made by viewers last only for the current viewing session. To restore the width defined by the report author, right-click the column header and select Reset column width. To learn more, refer to the Adjust column width in Power BI tables documentation. Visual calculations for small multiples (Generally Available) You can now use visual calculations in visuals with small multiples. Create calculations such as moving averages and compare trends across categories without adding separate measures to the semantic model. In the visual matrix, the field in the small multiples field well appears on the ROWPAGES axis. You can select ROWPAGES by itself or combine them with ROWS and COLUMNS to control how the calculation moves through the visual. e: Create a moving average visual calculation for a line chart divided into small multiples by country. To learn more, refer to the Visual calculations overview documentation. Design ribbon for Power BI reports (Generally Available) The new Design ribbon brings report styling tools together in one location. Apply a built-in or organizational theme, open the Theme pane to customize report-wide defaults, or import and download theme files directly from the ribbon. You can also quickly open Page size, Page background, and Wallpaper settings for the current page. Two new built-in themes, Dark and Soft dark, use the new Versa color palette and styling that closely follows the Fluent 2 base theme. These themes let you design against a dark report canvas and return to the default light theme before publishing if needed. To learn more, refer to the Use the Design ribbon in Power BI documentation. Slider color options for Slicer visual (Generally Available) Match your slicer's slider to your report design. The Slicer visual's Between, Before, After, and Date picker settings include a Slider format section where you can turn the slider on or off, set the handle style, and choose colors for the handles, selected range, and track. Handle options adjust based on the Responsive layout toggle (General > Properties > Advanced options). When Responsive is on, handles appear as circles with Fill color, Border, and Size. When Responsive is off, handles appear as rectangular bars with Border, Width, and Height. To learn more, refer to the Slicer visual in Power BI documentation. Translytical task flows show user date function (UDF) information in button action (Generally Available) The formatting pane now displays the Workspace, Function set, and Data function assigned to a data function button. These read-only details help you confirm that the button references the intended function without reopening the OneLake catalog. This information is especially useful when you review or troubleshoot reports that use several functions or connect to functions across multiple workspaces. To learn how to configure data function buttons, refer to Create a data function button in Power BI. Format pane headers stay visible as you scroll (Generally Available) Expanded section headers now remain visible at the top of the Format visual pane as you scroll through their settings. This update helps you keep track of the section you’re editing, especially when a section contains many formatting options. For example, when you scroll through color settings, the Colors and Data colors headers remain visible for context. To learn more about formatting visuals, refer to Get started formatting report visualizations. Pick the axis initial scroll position (Generally Available) Categorical axes—like month, year, or product name—show a scrollbar when there are more categories than fit in the visual. Until now, the scrollbar always started at the beginning of the data, so the oldest values displayed first. This month, you can set Initial scroll position to End on the axis Layout section, and the visual loads with the most recent data in view. Users can still scroll back to see earlier history. The option is available on stacked, clustered, and 100% stacked bar and column charts; line, area, stacked area, and 100% stacked area charts; line and stacked column and line and clustered column charts; ribbon, waterfall, and scatter charts with a categorical X-axis. Initial scroll positionset toEndon the X-axis. The scrollbar is positioned on the right, showing the most recent months first. To learn more, refer to the Customize x-axis and y-axis properties documentation. Azure Maps geocoding improvements (Generally Available) Large reference layers now render correctly when you filter your report. Reference layers add geographic context using points, lines, and polygons, such as locations, routes, postal codes, sales territories, and administrative regions. The Azure Maps visual renders up to 30,000 reference-layer features at a time. Previously, when a reference layer exceeded this limit, features excluded from the initial view could remain missing even after a report filter narrowed the data to a smaller area. . . . Now, Azure Maps re-evaluates the reference-layer features whenever report filters are applied. The unfiltered view is still limited to 30,000 features, but a filtered view accurately displays the relevant features, up to that limit. On-object interaction improvements (Preview) Based on your feedback during preview, we're introducing the first in a series of on-object interaction improvements, designed to make quick edits to your visuals easier. This month we're refining how you add data and manage some visual elements. The Build flyout now opens only when you select Add data, helping you stay focused when dragging and dropping data directly onto a visual or into the Build pane. We’ve also separated Title and Subtitle in the Add to your visual flyout, so you can manage them independently. In addition, title and subtitle are now turned off by default for matrix, table, and card visuals in reports that use the latest base theme. New reports automatically use the latest base theme. For existing reports, select Update theme in the Theme pane to apply this change. You can turn either element back on when needed. to your visual menu. To learn more, refer to the using on-object interaction with visuals and updating to the latest base theme documentation. Support for Fabric Apps in Org apps (Coming Soon) Soon, users will be able to include generative Fabric Apps alongside the reports, dashboards, notebooks, and other content in your Org Apps. For example, imagine you want people to rate the content in an Org App and share feedback about what would make it more useful. You can create a Fabric App for that experience and add it directly to the Org App. Whether you’re helping people explore what could happen next, act on an insight, or complete a specialized workflow, Fabric Apps give you a flexible new way to build for your audience without sending them somewhere else. Together, organizational apps and Fabric Apps provide a way to bring enterprise reporting, content, and tailored experiences together for your organization. Learn more about org apps and item types supported, including Fabric Apps. Changes to Power BI subscription email delivery Power BI is updating the platform used to deliver subscription emails as part of ongoing improvements to delivery reliability and long-term service health. As eligible subscriptions move to the updated platform, customers may notice changes to the sender identity and email formatting. Each subscription transfers automatically when it moves. Customers do not need to recreate it or change its schedule or recipients. After selecting Subscribe for an item, an information icon identifies a subscription that has moved to the updated email delivery platform. Learn more about changes to Power BI subscription emails. Increased Export to Excel row limits (Coming Soon) Many users export Power BI data to Excel for further analysis. This month, we're increasing the maximum number of rows that can be exported from table visuals using Data with current layout from 150,000 to 500,000. This increase helps you analyze larger datasets in Excel with fewer export operations. s. To learn more about exporting data from Power BI visuals, refer to Export data from a Power BI visualization. Value selection in Narrative visual We are replacing the Q&A natural language experience for creating dynamic values in the Narrative visual and text box with a more deterministic UI. This is due to the ongoing deprecation of the Q&A tool, and also based on feedback that it was hard to deterministically pick exact values through the Q&A experience. Authors can now create and edit custom values through a direct, deterministic UI: select a column or measure, apply any valid summarization, and add any type of filter. Auto-generated values are unchanged, and values previously authored with Q&A remain available as read-only. To learn more, refer to the Create Smart Narrative documentation. Modeling Create and edit DirectQuery semantic models in the Power BI service DirectQuery semantic models can now be created and edited directly in the Power BI service, eliminating the need to download and use Power BI Desktop. Previously, building models that query data sources in real time meant downloading Desktop, authoring the model, and publishing it to the web. Now, web-based modeling gives your team the freedom to: Work from any device: Mac, Linux and Windows users can now author DirectQuery models straight from the browser. Collaborate in real time: Multiple team members can work on the same semantic model simultaneously. Ditch the desktop loop: Skip the download-edit-republish cycle and update your models instantly in the service. Capabilities on the web Start from scratch: Connect to a supported data source and choose DirectQuery mode. Figure: Power Query interface displaying data source connection settings, with DirectQuery selected as the data connectivity mode. Full modeling control: Open existing DirectQuery models to manage relationships, write DAX and tweak table/column properties. : Model View in Power BI Service showing tables, relationships, and the properties panel for editing a DirectQuery semantic model. Flexible storage modes: Easily switch table storage modes from DirectQuery to Import or Dual if needed. : Properties pane that allows user to switch table storage modes from DirectQuery to Import or Dual. Thanks to this new capability, composite models are also available on the web! Head to the Power BI service and open one of your DirectQuery semantic models or create a brand-new one. We'd love to hear what you think! Learn more in the DirectQuery documentation. Approximate Distinct Count comes to Import and Direct Lake (Preview) Distinct count is one of the most resource-intensive operations in any analytical engine. As data cardinality grows, so do CPU and memory usage, often slowing down your interactive reports. APPROXIMATEDISTINCTCOUNT already offered a faster alternative for DirectQuery sources such as Azure SQL, Synapse, BigQuery, Databricks, and Snowflake. This month we're extending support to Import, Direct Lake on OneLake, and Direct Lake on SQL semantic models. DAX = APPROXIMATEDISTINCTCOUNT(<columnName>) : Model View in Power BI Service showing tables, relationships, and the properties panel for editing a DirectQuery semantic model. How it works and when to use it Instead of scanning every single unique value, APPROXIMATEDISTINCTCOUNT calculates a highly accurate estimate of unique values with a standard error rate of ~1.6%. In return, you get faster query execution times. Best for high-cardinality columns: Use it on columns with millions of unique values (such as transaction IDs, user IDs, or timestamps) where an approximate result can reduce the resources required to calculate distinct values. Keep standard DISTINCTCOUNT for low-cardinality data: Stick to exact counts for smaller attributes like Country, Category, or Status, where standard calculation is already fast, or for financial metrics where absolute precision is required. Swap APPROXIMATEDISTINCTCOUNT into your heaviest measures today and let us know how much speed you gain on your models! Learn more in the APPROXIMATEDISTINCTCOUNT documentation. Accelerate text searches in your semantic models with String Indexing (Preview) String Indexing for Power BI semantic models is coming soon! If your reports rely heavily on text fields, such as product names, customer comments, or long descriptions, you’ve likely faced slow performance when users search or filter on large semantic models. String Indexing is designed to improve text-search performance in supported semantic models. Why String Indexing? Common text operations like DAX functions (SEARCH(), CONTAINSSTRING()) and advanced text slicers in reports traditionally scan data row-by-row. As datasets grow, these scans slow down query times. String Indexing builds specialized indexes so the engine can locate matching text more efficiently, which can improve report responsiveness for both Import and Direct Lake semantic models. Indexing modes You can configure String Indexing via model metadata to fit your workload needs: Auto Mode: Automatically builds the index on the first query execution for a qualifying column. The index does not persist in storage; it remains in memory only while the column is loaded and will be rebuilt on subsequent queries if evicted. Ideal for smaller models. Full Mode: Builds and persists the index during scheduled data refreshes. While refresh times and model size may slightly increase, users enjoy consistently fast query performance right out of the box. Get started String Indexing requires a semantic model running at 1707 compatibility level. During this initial preview phase, indexing can be configured through TMDL on the web or XMLA metadata. Desktop support and a dedicated UI experience within Power BI are planned for a future release to simplify setup. Check out the String Indexing documentation for setting up instructions, prerequisites, and guidance on choosing the right indexing mode for your models. We look forward to seeing how this feature helps make text-heavy reporting experiences faster and more responsive! Introducing Full-Text Search in Power BI Semantic Models (Preview) Full-Text Indexing for Power BI semantic models is coming soon! While traditional string searches look for exact character matches, Full-Text Indexing enables a more intelligent search experience based on the meaning of words and natural language concepts. This capability powers two new DAX functions, TEXTCONTAINS() and TEXTSIMILARITY(), making it easier than ever to analyze large volumes of textual data directly in your semantic models. Why Full-Text Indexing? Business data increasingly contains rich text content such as customer feedback, support tickets, product descriptions, incident summaries, and knowledge articles. Searching this data using traditional string matching often requires exact matches and can miss relevant results due to differences in spelling, word forms, or phrasing. Full-Text Indexing builds a specialized search index at the column level, allowing semantic models to understand words rather than just character sequences. This enables advanced search experiences such as: Finding related words through linguistic analysis (for example, run, running, and runs) Matching singular and plural variations automatically Ignoring common stop words such as "the" or "and" Supporting phrase-based searches Tolerating minor spelling mistakes through fuzzy matching Enabling semantic similarity search scenarios Getting Started FTS Indexing requires a semantic model running at 1708 compatibility level. During this initial preview phase, indexing can be configured through TMDL on the web or XMLA metadata. Desktop support and a dedicated UI experience within Power BI are planned for a future release to simplify setup. New DAX functions Full-Text Indexing is required for two new DAX functions: TEXTCONTAINS() Returns TRUE when a text value matches a search expression using full-text search semantics rather than simple substring matching. It supports multiple search modes, including keyword matching, phrase matching, and fuzzy matching for typo tolerance TextContains(<WithinTextColumn>, <SearchText>, [MatchMode]) Example: "Show me all reviews that mention spa." The review either matches or it doesn't. TEXTSIMILARITY() Returns a relevance score indicating how well the text in <WithinTextColumn> matches <SearchText>. It enables similarity-based text comparisons, helping identify records that are semantically related even when they do not contain the exact same words. TextSimilarity(<WithinTextColumn>, <SearchText> [, <MatchMode>]) Example: "Show me the 10 reviews most relevant to 'good breakfast'." Reviews mentioning both terms prominently rank higher than reviews that only partially match. Learn more about these two new DAX functions (TEXTCONTAINS, TEXTSIMILARITY) in our documentation. Full-Text Indexing is supported for both Import and Direct Lake models, with Full mode recommended (during Preview) for the best out-of-the-box performance and user experience. Refer to the Full Text Indexing documentation to learn more about prerequisites, configuration options, and setup instructions. Data connectivity New Power Query editor (Preview) Since May of this year, the modern Get Data experience has been available in preview inside Power BI Desktop; the feedback we've gathered from that rollout has directly shaped what comes next. Your reports of friction points, missing capabilities, and rough edges between the legacy and modern interfaces went straight into the backlog, and this month that work pays off: the full modern Power Query Editor experience moves into preview. It's the same trusted engine, wrapped in a completely refreshed editing surface — and we're still closing the remaining gaps with the legacy UI as we go. Let's explore six key reasons to enable and try this feature. Modern Get Data - The same connector browsing and search experience you already know from Fabric Dataflow Gen2 — now in Desktop. Searchable, categorized, and designed to make connectors easier to find and navigate than the legacy dialog. Try it: Connect to a new data source and browse the OneLake catalog. To learn more, refer to the Data sources in Power BI Desktop documentation. Dark theme, end to end - No more jarring light-mode panes breaking your flow. The legacy editor only partially supported dark theme. The modern editor applies it consistently across the preview grid, dialogs, and other parts of the editing surface. Folding visibility - Stop guessing whether your query folds. Step folding indicators mark each step as folding or not, and the new query plan shows exactly how the engine intends to evaluate your query — and where folding breaks down. Try it: Open the query plan on a query with several steps and find where folding stops. To learn more, refer to the Understanding Query Evaluation and Query Folding in Power Query documentation. Diagram view - See how your queries relate to each other visually, instead of reverse-engineering it from names. A gamechanger for files you've inherited or models with long reference/merge chains. Try it: Open a file with referenced queries and trace a merge visually. To learn more, refer to the Diagram view documentation. New capabilities, now on Desktop - Features that used to live only on the web are now here: rank column, cluster values, schema view, query script view, plus upgrades to transforms you already use daily. Try it: Add a rank column or cluster values on a messy text column. To learn more, refer to the Rank column and Use Schema View documentation. Export a Power Query template - Capture your solution at a point in time and take it with you. Export a template from Desktop and import it straight into a Dataflow Gen2 — queries, steps, and structure intact. Try it: Export a template from a multi-query file and import it into a Dataflow Gen2 to compare. Figure: Screenshot of the Export template experience in the Power Query editor. To learn more, refer to the Power Query template documentation. Ready to try it? Enabling the modern Power Query experience takes just a few seconds — no restart required: Open Power BI Desktop. Locate: File > Options and settings > Options. Under Preview features, check New Power Query experience. Open (or reopen) the Power Query Editor — you're now in the modern experience. Once you've had a chance to explore this new user interface and its experiences, we want to hear from you. Share your thoughts on the new Power Query experience in the Fabric Community — what's working, what's missing, and what would make it a compelling alternative from the legacy editor. Every comment helps shape what ships next. Microsoft Outlook Mail connector (Preview) We're introducing the new Microsoft Outlook Mail connector (Preview) for Power BI Desktop. Built on the Microsoft Graph API, it lets you read your mailbox data — folders, messages, and attachments — using an organizational account. This is the first in a set of new connectors we'll be releasing as a modern alternative to the Exchange Online connector. The initial preview is scoped to Mail in Power BI Desktop. Additional connectors for Calendar Events, Contacts, and Tasks are on the roadmap, along with Excel and Power BI service / Fabric Dataflows Gen2 support. Scheduled refresh isn't supported yet — this applies to both the Power BI service and refreshes routed through the on-premises data gateway. To try it, enable the Microsoft Outlook Mail preview feature under Options in Power BI Desktop, then open Get Data → Online Services → Microsoft Outlook Mail and sign in with your organizational account. To learn more, refer to the Microsoft Outlook Mail connector documentation. More flexible Data Privacy Firewall query patterns in Power BI Desktop (Preview) Power BI Desktop now allows Data Privacy Firewall partitions that reference other partitions also access data sources when the privacy levels of the involved data sources are compatible. Introduced in the July 2026 release and enabled by default, this preview setting aligns Power BI Desktop with Power Query Online, gateways, and the Power BI service. This change supports common query patterns in which one query returns a value that another query uses to build a web request, SQL statement, file path, or other data source request. These patterns can now run without refactoring queries or duplicating logic solely to satisfy the previous partition restriction. The Data Privacy Firewall remains active. Power Query continues to evaluate the privacy levels of the involved data sources before combining data, helping authors use more flexible query designs while preserving privacy protections. To learn more, refer to the Allow data privacy firewall partitions that reference other partitions to also access data sources documentation. Mobile Mobile page indicator (Generally Available) Know immediately which report pages are mobile-ready, without clicking through them. Each page that has a mobile layout shows an icon on its page tab in the footer, so you can spot your mobile coverage instantly. Pages without a mobile layout stay unmarked, making it easy to see what's left to optimize. The icon is coming soon to both Power BI Desktop and the Power BI service. In Power BI Desktop, it appears in both desktop layout view and mobile layout view, so you can track mobile coverage right where you work. In the Power BI service, it appears in mobile layout view. Page tabs marked with an icon to show which pages have a mobile layout. To learn how to build mobile-optimized reports, refer to the Mobile-optimized Power BI reports overview documentation. Contact details in Info drawer (Generally Available) We’re making it easier to connect with the right people from the Power BI Mobile app. You can now find contact details in the Info drawer for reports, apps, and dashboards, and email the relevant contact directly from your phone. To learn more about Power BI in mobile, refer to the What Are the Power BI Mobile Apps? documentation. Developers and APIs Power BI Projects (PBIP) (Generally Available) Since entering preview in 2023, PBIP has changed how developers build and manage Power BI content. It stores report and semantic model definitions as human-readable text files, turning a Power BI solution into a codebase. Developers can search these files, track changes in Git, review diffs in pull requests, automate updates with scripts and pipelines, and use AI agents to work with models and reports. Changes remain visible and reversible, which makes team development easier and safer. Recent improvements have made the workflow more practical. These include opening a project directly in Visual Studio Code and detecting external file changes in Power BI Desktop. New underlying formats capabilities: Tabular Model Definition Language (TMDL) for semantic models. Power BI Enhanced Report Format (PBIR) for reports. PBIR is now the default report format for PBIX and PBIP files. New reports use it from the start. When you edit a report that uses the legacy format, Power BI tools automatically convert it to PBIR. To learn more, refer to the Power BI Projects documentation. New Purge Data option for Fabric APIs The new Purge Data option for Fabric APIs gives developers and administrators greater control over programmatic semantic model deployments. This capability allows users to explicitly approve deployments that may require removing existing data, helping unblock scenarios such as schema or data type changes that previously failed validation checks. Designed with both safety and automation in mind, purgeData keeps data protection safeguards enabled by default while giving developers the flexibility they need to manage complex deployment scenarios at scale. To learn more, refer to the Purge Data documentation. Other Data updated and sensitivity fields of Power BI report in Microsoft Teams preview card (Coming Soon) Power BI report previews in Microsoft Teams will soon surface the report's last refresh date and sensitivity label. These additional signals will help users quickly assess the freshness, relevance, and classification of a report before opening it. To learn how Power BI content is displayed in Microsoft Teams, refer to the Link preview cards in Microsoft Teams chats and channels documentation. Artifact info header for Power BI tabs in Microsoft Teams (Generally Available) Power BI content in Microsoft Teams tabs now includes the artifact info header, giving users the context they need without leaving their flow of work. Available for reports, apps, organizational apps, dashboards, and scorecards, the header brings key artifact information and actions together in one place. The new header displays the artifact name and sensitivity label and provides an entry point to artifact metadata. You can open the artifact in the Power BI personal app in Teams, open it in a browser, and refresh the tab. Tab owners can control their experience with the new Show info header setting on the tab settings page. The setting is 'on’ by default and can be turned off when a more compact tab experience is preferred. To learn how to add Power BI content as a tab in Microsoft Teams, refer to the Embed Power BI reports in Microsoft Teams documentation. Third-party custom visuals graphomate matrix The graphomate chartrix is a brand-new charting visual, and it offers various improvements over graphomate charts. First and probably most obvious is the new interactive user interface which enables users to define most elements of the chart layout directly on the visual. To keep this interface effective and uncluttered it focuses on the most important parameters of your chart. Users can now create combination charts which were simply not possible before. There are also new chart types like the variance waterfall, which automatically renders from one measure and two dimensions. Of course, the graphomate chartrix is IBCS® certified. With the latest release an XFL editor has been introduced, which helps you write scripts to format the chartrix far beyond the possibilities of the regular option set. XFL scripts also provide a way to conditionally format the visualization, dynamically changing properties in relation to the actual data. This new visual is provided free of charge to existing customers of the graphomate charts. All development efforts will be focused on making the graphomate chartrix the best IBCS® charting visual there is. Video Link: graphomate chartrix for Microsoft Power BI AppSource Link: graphomate chartrix Sample Report Link Drill Down Bubble PRO by ZoomCharts Drill Down Bubble PRO is a Power BI visual designed for exploring relationships, trends, and outliers across multiple dimensions of data. It adds richer exploration, selection, and analytical capabilities directly inside the visual. Key features include: Multi-level drill down to explore data hierarchies from a high-level overview to detailed insights. Pan and zoom controls to navigate dense datasets and focus on specific clusters or individual data points. Area and lasso selection to quickly isolate groups of bubbles and use selections for interactive analysis and filtering. Dynamic regression lines that recalculate as the displayed data changes, making trends and relationships easier to identify. Line and area thresholds to highlight targets, ranges, exceptions, or other important business benchmarks. Area shading to visually group and compare selected segments of data. 200+ formatting settings to tailor the chart to different reporting and branding needs. Figure: Drill Down Bubble PRO demonstrates multi-level drill down, panning, and zoom controls for exploring data from high-level patterns to detailed points. These capabilities make Drill Down Bubble PRO especially useful for customer segmentation, sales analysis, portfolio analysis, performance monitoring, and other scenarios where users need to actively explore patterns rather than simply display them. Get on Markeplace Commenting in view mode: introducing Zebra BI Tables+ & Charts+ It's month-end. A regional manager opens the report, spots a variance in their region, and knows exactly why it happened. But the report isn't theirs to edit, so the explanation ends up where it always does: a screenshot pasted into PowerPoint, emailed around, detached from the number that prompted it. That's the collaboration gap. Your report shows what happened; the why and the what next leave the report and get lost. Meet Zebra BI Tables+ and Charts+: two new visuals that keep everything existing Zebra BI Tables and Charts offer and add a built-in collaboration layer. Report viewers can add comments directly on a data point, in view mode, with no Power BI edit access. Each comment is anchored to the exact figure and stored in your own SharePoint file. Zebra BI stores nothing. ting files from SharePoint, and collaborate directly in view mode. So instead of screenshotting insights into PowerPoint or maintaining a custom workaround, the whole team explains and decides right on the report. Instead of slides or emails, the next steps can be defined directly on the spot. Stop losing good decisions to a missing context. Start making them on the report. Try Zebra BI Tables+ and Charts+ free for 14 days on AppSource. Network Graph by Powerviz The Powerviz Network Graph is a visual representation of Nodes and the relationships or connections between them. Its primary purpose is to illustrate how different entities are related or interact with one another. Key Features Line Options: Customise node links with different styles and colors. Node Shape: Choose from various shapes, icons, or upload your own. Labels: Display categories, values, and percentage labels. Data Colors: Access 30+ color palettes, including color-blind-safe options. Fill Patterns: Highlight nodes with patterns or upload your own. Conditional Formatting: Highlight outliers based on measures or category rules. Clusters: Group related nodes to reveal patterns. Relationships: Analyze node connections at a glance. Animation: Add pop-ups and highlight effects. Import/Export: Save and reuse themes easily. Toolbars: Gain advanced control over the graph. Other features included are Sorting, Ranking, Lasso / Reverse Lasso, Grid View and more. Business Use Cases Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Supply Chain Optimization, Social Network Analysis (SNA). Resources Try Network Graph visual for FREE from AppSource Check out all features of the visual Step-by-step instructions YouTube Video Learn more about visuals Follow Powerviz on LinkedIn Hierarchical Bar Chart New, exciting changes were made to Hierarchical Bar Chart. Bubble Matrix for stacks - The visual now provides the option to show stacks as bubbles below the bars. lues into bar-and-bubble matrix layouts for clearer comparison of category totals and component contributions. Display Stacks as Clustered Columns - From the format pane settings, you can choose to display stacks as clustered column chart. Filter using legends - You can click on a stack legend to filter out other stacks. On mouse hover relevant stack gets highlighted. Stack ribbons and %age of total - You can now choose to connect stacks with ribbon and show percentage of total for each stack. Resources Check out the Hierarchical Bar Chart Update YouTube video. Download the visual from APPSOURCE Download a sample pbix file For more information refer to Hierarchical Bar Chart or contact us. That’s a wrap! The European Microsoft Fabric + SQL Community Conference is just getting started, and there's never been a more exciting time to be part of the Power BI community. We hope these updates help you discover new capabilities, streamline your workflows, and get even more value from your data. Be sure to explore the links throughout this post for deeper technical guidance and follow along with the latest announcements and sessions from Barcelona.
Manage semantic model settings in context with the default settings pane (Preview)
The semantic model settings pane is becoming the default way to configure semantic models in the Power BI service. The pane opens alongside your workspace, so you can review and change settings without leaving the current page. It provides the same settings as the full semantic model settings page while keeping the surrounding context visible. The classic settings page remains available during this transition, but it no longer opens first. This change builds on the settings pane preview and provides a more focused experience for managing semantic models. Why it matters The pane helps you stay in context while you manage a semantic model. It opens on the right side of the browser window and keeps your workspace visible. Settings are organized into expandable sections and tabs, including refresh, data access, performance, and OneDrive and SharePoint. You can use the search box at the top of the pane to find a setting across all sections and tabs. For example, enter "re" and select View refresh history to go directly to refresh history instead of opening sections one at a time. This organization is especially useful for semantic models with several connection, refresh, or performance settings. You can review a setting, make a change, and return to your work without navigating to a separate page. What's changing The settings pane was an optional experience earlier in the preview. As this change rolls out, the pane opens by default when you open settings for a semantic model. The rollout is gradual, so the timing can vary by environment. The pane includes the settings available on the full settings page. Its main area groups related settings into expandable sections, and the tabs at the top organize settings by category. Use the search box when you know the setting you want or browse the sections to review related options together. If you prefer the full-page experience, select Open settings page at the bottom of the pane. The classic page opens in the same browser window. This option can help when you want to compare settings across semantic models or continue using a familiar workflow during the transition. The classic settings page will be retired over time, so the switchback option is intended to support the transition. We're also working to consolidate related settings, including scheduled refresh and data connections. These planned improvements apply to the settings pane. The preview experience and behavior might change before general availability. Next steps Understand Semantic model permissions in Power BI. Learn how to use the pane in Manage semantic model settings in the settings pane. Open the settings for one of your semantic models and explore the grouped sections and search. Share feature suggestions through Fabric Community Ideas. Share feedback about the preview in the comments.Modern Power BI architecture choices for reporting on Azure Databricks: A performance benchmark for Power BI storage modes
Many enterprise Power BI semantic models use Azure Databricks as a data source. When building these models, developers and architects face an early and consequential decision: which storage mode to use. Cost, security, and ease of development and tuning all factor in — but report performance is probably the most important of them, because reports that are slow to load are one of the most common causes of end-user dissatisfaction. In practice, that decision is often made on intuition rather than evidence. To help change that, we've published a new white paper, Modern Power BI Architecture Choices for Reporting on Azure Databricks, benchmarking four ways of serving the same Delta tables to a Power BI report: Direct Lake on OneLake — over Delta tables in a Fabric lakehouse or warehouse Direct Lake on mirrored Unity Catalog tables — shortcuts, no copy DirectQuery — on a Databricks SQL warehouse Composite Model on Databricks — DirectQuery combined with Import-mode aggregations Figure: The four Power BI storage modes benchmarked to evaluate their impact on report performance and scalability. What the results suggest: there's no universal winner — but there are clear patterns. Direct Lake on OneLake performed well across the widest range of situations in this benchmark. It's highly competitive at smaller and mid-size volumes, and for the typical Power BI workload — where reports are used repeatedly throughout the day — it delivers interactive performance without extra modeling effort. At the top end of the volume curve, the picture shifts. With billions of rows, a Composite Model with aggregations was the fastest and most consistent pattern, staying sub-100ms on queries the aggregation tables can resolve. The caveat is equally clear: that advantage doesn't extend to queries that fall through to the underlying DirectQuery source, so the payoff depends on how well your aggregations match real user behavior. These are just the headline findings — the detailed results vary considerably by data volume, cache state, filter scenario, and query type. We'd encourage you to read the white paper for the full picture before deciding on a pattern. One thing worth noting up front: this is a point-in-time comparison as of June/July 2026, and both platforms are moving quickly. It also measures the end-user query experience within Power BI, rather than raw database execution speed. Treat it as a guide for running your own testing, on your own data. Explore the white paper for a full walkthrough of through each pattern in detail — the test setup, what was measured, and how results break down by data volume, cache state, and query type. Visit the Power BI download center to access the paper and other related resources.Direct Lake Calculated Columns (Preview)
Calculated columns are now available in preview for Direct Lake on OneLake semantic models. This has been one of the most requested capabilities since Direct Lake launched and closes a long-standing gap with Import and DirectQuery storage modes. 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. The problem this solves Direct Lake combines Import-like performance with near real-time data freshness by querying Delta tables in OneLake and loading data into memory as needed. But until now, if your model needed a derived column, you had only two options: push the logic upstream into the data source or move the table to a different storage mode. Calculated columns close that gap – you can now define columns directly in the semantic model using DAX without leaving Direct Lake. What you can build Common use cases include: Derived values, such as an age calculated from a birth date. Concatenating fields, such as city and region into a single field for slicers. Formatted dates like Month-Year for grouping in visuals. Multilingual reports using data translations with USERCULTURE(). Personalized content based on functions like USERPRINCIPALNAME(). Examples 1. Age = DATEDIFF( DimCustomer[BirthDate], TODAY(), YEAR ) 2. Customer Location = DimCustomer[CityName] & ", " & DimCustomer[ContinentName] 3. Month Name = FORMAT( DimDate[FirstOfMonth], "mmmm", USERCULTURE() ) The first two return the same value for every user unless security context differs. The third adapts to the language of the person viewing the report – see Month Name. Calculated columns now have a new Expression Context property. Direct Lake calculated columns support User Context expression context only. With User Context: The expression is evaluated when a user queries the model. Evaluation respects row-level security (RLS) and object-level security (OLS). Expressions that do not reference user-aware DAX expressions or secured columns typically return the same value for every user. Considerations: Cannot be used in relationships. Direct Lake calculated columns are evaluated at query time and do not materialize. Because of this, they cannot be used as relationship keys. Build relationship keys in the Delta table when needed. Do not observe filter context. Calculated columns return a fixed value for each row and do not respond to report filters or slicers. Use a measure when the result must change based on report interactions. Unlike standard calculated columns, Direct Lake calculated columns are evaluated in the current user's security context. This means calculations automatically respect RLS and OLS. Security behavior across expression contexts The security difference is easiest to see with a column that references a protected value. Consider a model where OLS hides DimCustomer[Education] from a "NoEducationOLS" role, and a calculated column derived from it: Is Graduate = IF( DimCustomer[Education] = "Graduate Degree", "Yes", "No" ) The result depends on the expression context: Import - Standard Import - User Context Direct Lake - User Context Observes OLS No Yes Yes Result for a restricted user "Yes" or "No", derived from the hidden value Column not available Column not available With Standard, a restricted user still sees the derived answer and the protection is effectively bypassed. With User Context in both Import and Direct Lake, the reference to the secured column is evaluated within the user's security context, so the restricted user does not see the derived column. The sensitive value is never exposed. Import – Standard Expression Context Import – User Context Expression Context Getting Started Calculated columns for Direct Lake are available in preview. Open a Direct Lake on OneLake semantic model in the web or Desktop, create a calculated column, and begin modeling directly in DAX. To learn more, see the Create calculated columns in Power BI Desktop documentation.
TMDL View on the web: Edit semantic models as code in your browser (Preview)
TMDL View on the Web is a feature in Power BI that enables developers to view and edit semantic models as code directly in the browser using TMDL. It expands the Power BI web modelling experience by introducing a rich code editor for working with TMDL scripts—giving pro developers full transparency into the semantic model code and enabling more efficient workflows through code editing.Get ready for table discovery in OneLake Catalog search (Preview)
In late September, OneLake Catalog will begin surfacing tables as searchable objects in Microsoft Fabric. This change expands which table metadata users can discover based on their existing item permissions, so administrators may want to review the related tenant setting before rollout. To give organizations time to prepare, the controlling tenant setting is already available in the Fabric admin portal. Administrators can review and configure this setting before table search becomes available. Tables are the first object, an entity contained inside a Microsoft Fabric item, that OneLake Catalog will return as a standalone search result. Bringing objects into search makes the catalog more useful for everyday discovery because they are often where analysis, reporting, and development work begins. Find tables directly Finding the right data often starts below the item level. You may know a table name, its purpose, or only the name of a column it contains, but not which item contains it. Table discovery will let you search directly for tables in semantic models, lakehouses, and mirrored databases without first locating and opening the parent item. We plan to support tables from more Microsoft Fabric item types, along with additional object types, as OneLake Catalog expands beyond item-level discovery. Each matching table will appear as its own result rather than as metadata attached to the parent item. Columns will not appear as standalone results, but you can still find the relevant table when a column name is your only starting point. Table discovery will be available in Fabric’s global search UI and programmatically through the OneLake Catalog Search API. You will be able to search by table name or description or use an exact column-name match to find its containing table, without knowing the workspace or parent item in advance. You can also access search through the Fabric Core remote MCP server, Fabric local MCP server, or the search skill from the Fabric Skills library. These options bring the same permission-aware discovery to applications, AI agents, GitHub Copilot, and other compatible AI coding tools. Understand how permissions affect table visibility Before table search becomes available, administrators should understand how existing permissions affect what users can discover. This change does not grant access to additional data, but it may allow users to discover metadata for tables contained within items they can already access. You can discover a table only if you have Read control-plane permission or higher on its parent item. You do not need Read All or Read Data permission to find a table in search. Data-plane permissions, including OneLake security, do not change whether a table appears in catalog search. The relevant workload still enforces its data-access permissions when you open, query, or otherwise use the table. Catalog discoverability and data access remain separate decisions. Tables in semantic models protected by object-level security are excluded from search. Object-level security can protect table and column names as well as their metadata, so OneLake Catalog currently does not surface tables from those models. Control object discovery with a tenant setting Before table search rolls out, Fabric administrators should review the Users can find objects in search tenant setting. This setting controls whether users can discover contained objects such as tables through Global Search and the Search API. The setting is enabled by default, allowing users to find supported objects when they have access to the parent item. When it is disabled, search results are limited to top-level Fabric items, such as lakehouses and reports. Disabling the setting does not change access to the underlying items or data; it changes whether contained objects appear in search. Additional search improvements Apart from table discovery, this release also introduces several improvements in search for Microsoft Fabric items. Get richer item results New filters and expanded metadata make item results more precise and useful. You can: Return and filter item results by endorsement status, workspace ID, and sensitivity label ID. Find dataflows and dashboards in search results. Identify reports and dashboards included in a workspace app and retrieve the relevant app context. This context helps you distinguish between similar items, apply governance signals, and choose the right result without making additional requests. These improvements provide more ways to narrow large result sets and enough context to understand where an item belongs before you open it. Refine searches with new operators New query operators give you more control over how search interprets your terms: Use quotation marks (" ") to search for an exact phrase. Use an asterisk (*) as a wildcard for multiple characters. Use a question mark (?) as a wildcard for a single character. Use double ampersands (&&) to return only results that contain all specified terms. These operators help you narrow results when names are similar or when you know only part of a name. Prepare for rollout Tables are the starting point for discovery below the Fabric item level. The same catalog model can support more object types over time while preserving parent context, permission trimming, and a consistent way to search. For now, table search addresses a common need: finding the table you want from its name, description, or an exact column-name match without already knowing where it lives. Table search will begin rolling out late September. Before rollout, administrators should review the tenant setting, and developers can prepare the search experiences they plan to offer: Review the Users can find objects in search tenant setting in the Fabric admin portal and decide whether object discovery should be enabled for your organization. Explore the OneLake Catalog Search API if you build data portals, governance tools, or other discovery experiences. Connect an AI development tool through a Fabric MCP server or install the search skill from the Fabric Skills library to prepare agentic discovery workflows.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.
