After more than two years in development and six months in public preview, Microsoft Fabric is now generally available (GA). Here is the announcement made during Microsoft Ignite last week. If you are not familiar with Fabric, check out my blog Build announcement: Microsoft Fabric | James Serra’s Blog.

Make sure to check out the Microsoft Fabric roadmap at https://aka.ms/FabricRoadmap to be aware of those features that are not yet available in GA.

“General Availability” signifies that a product or service is fully developed, tested, and ready for production use. Once a product reaches GA, it has undergone thorough testing and improvements, addressing issues identified during the Public Preview. GA products are stable, fully functional, and backed by Microsoft’s support and Service Level Agreement (SLA) guarantees. This stage marks the official release of the service, ensuring reliability, performance standards, and compliance with relevant regulations, making it suitable for production environments.

Here are other major announcements made at Ignite about Fabric (the full list is here):

Mirroring, Microsoft Graph integration, disaster recovery

Mirroring is a new, frictionless way to add and manage existing cloud data warehouses and databases in Fabric’s Synapse Data Warehouse experience. Mirroring replicates a snapshot of the database to OneLake in Delta Parquet tables and keeps the replica in sync in near real time. Once the source database is attached, features like shortcuts, Direct Lake mode in Power BI, and the universal security model work instantly. Microsoft will soon enable Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL DB, Snowflake, and Mongo DB customers to use mirroring to access their data in OneLake, with more data sources coming in 2024 such as SQL Server, Azure PostgreSQL, and Azure MySQL. More info. For participation in the early adopter program, submit your application here.

Microsoft making it easier to analyze the vast amount of work data you have in Microsoft 365 with native integration into Microsoft Graph, the unified data model for products like Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Viva Insights, and more. Previously, Microsoft 365 data was only offered in JSON format, but it’s now also offered in Delta Parquet format for easy integration into OneLake. Your Microsoft 365 data can now be seamlessly joined with other data sources in OneLake. More info and Overview of Microsoft Graph Data Connect and Configure Microsoft 365 in a copy activity. Note that Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric doesn’t currently support the Microsoft 365 connector in Dataflow Gen2, so you need to use data pipelines.

Micrsoft announced disaster recovery for Fabric. With this feature your data in OneLake will be replicated across regions which will ensure availability of this data in case of regional outages. You will be able to choose which capacities need to be replicated via capacity level configurations. BCDR for Power BI will be available by default as it is today and isn’t impacted by this disaster recovery capability. More info

Power BI semantic model support for Direct Lake on Synapse Data Warehouse

Power BI semantic models can now leverage Direct Lake mode in conjunction with Synapse Data Warehouses in Microsoft Fabric. Until now, Direct Lake mode was limited to semantic models on Fabric lakehouses, while warehouses were queried only in DirectQuery mode. Now, Microsoft has expanded Direct Lake mode to support warehouses in Fabric as well. For more information, read the Direct Lake in Power BI and Microsoft Fabric page in the product documentation.

Announcing public preview of stored credentials for Direct Lake semantic model row-level security and object-level security

In public preview is row-level security (RLS) and object-level security (OLS) and stored credentials for Direct Lake semantic models. RLS and OLS security is a Power BI feature that enables you to define row-level and object-level access rules in a semantic model, so different users can see different subsets of the data based on their roles and permissions. Stored credentials help reduce configuration complexity and are strongly recommended when using RLS and OLS with Direct Lake semantic models. You can add users to RLS roles in a Direct Lake model using the web modelling experience. The web modeling security roles dialog will be fully deployed in the coming days or weeks. For more information about how to set up stored credentials, see the Direct Lake product documentation. For RLS and OLS, see the articles Row-level security (RLS) with Power BI and Object level security (OLS).

Instantly integrate your import-mode semantic models into OneLake

In public preview is Microsoft OneLake integration for import models. With the flick of a switch, you can enable OneLake integration and automatically write data imported into your semantic models to delta tables in OneLake and enjoy the benefits of Fabric without any migration effort. The data is instantly and concurrently accessible through these delta tables. Data scientists, database administrators, app developers, data engineers, citizen developers, and any other type of data consumer now have direct access to the same data that drives your business intelligence. Enable OneLake integration to include these delta tables in your Lakehouses and Synapse Data Warehouses through shortcuts, enabling your users to use T-SQL, Python, Scala, PySpark, Spark SQL, R, and no-code and low-code solutions to query the data. More info and OneLake integration for semantic models.

Quickly answer your data questions with Explore

There is a new public preview feature called Explore that will enable anyone to quickly explore a semantic model. Similar to exporting and building a PivotTable in Excel, you can open the Explore experience and create a matrix or visual view for your data. Analysts could use Explore to learn about a new semantic model before building a report for example, or a business user could answer a specific question they have about the data without building an entire report. More info,

Minimize costs with new Microsoft Fabric licensing options

In June 2023, Microsoft announced pay-as-you-go prices for Fabric that allow you to dynamically scale up or scale down and pause capacity as needed. There is now reservation pricing for Fabric that will allow you to pre-commit Fabric Capacity Units in one-year increments, helping you save up to 40.5 percent over the pay-as-you-go prices (excluding Power BI Premium capacity SKUs). Microsoft also announced OneLake business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) and cache storage prices, expanding on the already announced OneLake storage pricing. Check out all these pricing options on the Microsoft Fabric pricing page.

Announcing the public preview of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric

Now in public preview is Copilot in Microsoft Fabric. This helps users quickly get started by helping them create reports in the Power BI web experience. Based on a high-level prompt, Copilot for Power BI in Fabric creates an entire report page for you by identifying the tables, fields, measures, and charts that would help you get started. You can then customize the page using our existing editing experiences. Copilot can also help you understand your semantic model and even suggest topics for your report pages. It’s a fast and easy way to get started with a report, especially if you’re less familiar with report creation in Power BI.  Also new is a Narrative with Copilot visual. This visual summarizes the data and insights on the page, across your report, or even for your own template if you need to define a specific summary. 

Lastly, in Power BI Desktop, Copilot can help model authors improve their models and save time. The first capability Microsoft is releasing in November 2023 helps authors generate synonyms for their fields, measures, and tables using Copilot. But this is just the start. Future Power BI Desktop updates will bring even more new Copilot experiences, including the report creation experience from the service, a Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) writing experience, and more.

The preview of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric will be rolling out in stages with the goal that all customers with Power BI Premium capacity (P1 or higher) or Fabric capacity (F64 or higher) will have access to the Copilot preview by the end of March 2024. You don’t need to sign up to join the preview, it will automatically become available to you as a new setting in the Fabric admin portal when it is rolled out to your tenant. When charging begins for the Copilot in Fabric experiences, you can simply count Copilot usage against your existing Fabric or Power BI Premium capacity. Check out the Copilot for Power BI documentation for complete instructions and requirements.

Synapse Data Warehouse – Query Insights

Query Insights (QI) is a scalable, sustainable, and extendable solution to enhance the SQL analytics experience. With historical query data, aggregated insights, and access to actual query text, you can analyze and tune your SQL queries.

Query Insights provides a central location for historic query data and actionable insights for 30 days, helping you to make informed decisions to enhance the performance of your Warehouse or SQL Endpoint. When a SQL query runs in Microsoft Fabric, Query Insights collects and consolidates its execution data asynchronously, providing you with valuable information. Admin, Member, and Contributor roles can access the feature. More info.

What else was announced at Ignite?

For more information about what else was announced at Ignite concerning other products, check out Microsoft Ignite 2003 Book of News and Microsoft Ignite 2023: AI transformation and the technology driving change.

More info:

Fabric workloads are now generally available! | Microsoft Fabric Blog | Microsoft Fabric

Empower Power BI users with Microsoft Fabric and Copilot | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI