Microsoft Fabric Documentation (for Admins)

Maybe this topic is not the most sexiest of them all, but it certainly has the same (or maybe even more) amount of value for YOU!
And.. another post on my favorite topic: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

Earlier I wrote about the default domain settings, changes to the default tenant setting value for SQL database and I also covered the (rights of the) Fabric Adminsitrator role. Today I want to talk about a more meta-topic: existing documentation on Microsoft Learn, and of course specifically for Admins.

Microsoft Fabric documentation

By this point, I assume you've read this far (and perhaps a few other posts as well), I guess you've heard of Microsoft Learn. 😁 

If not, go there now: Microsoft Fabric documentation!

It is full of so much good content, to name a few:

• Overview 
• What is Fabric: The B.A.S.I.C.S.
• Security in Fabric: You might not be aware, but there's so many things you can do to tweak and adjust security for your organization!
• Concepts 
• Choose a Fabric data store: Choose between a Lakehouse, Warehouse, Eventhouse, or SQL Database
• Copilot in Fabric: In what workloads can you use Copilot and what are the prereqs?
• Capacity and license types: This explains concepts like a tenant, capacity, workspace, SKU's, Power BI licenses, etc.
• Tutorials
• Use taskflows to build solutions: I'm curious, who really uses these in their environment?
• End-to-end tutorials: Those tutorials where the corner-stone of getting started with Fabric after it was announced. They still provide enourmous value, although sometimes the steps can be very basic.

And there's so much more:

Ok, I know... Sometimes the documentation is, let's say, a bit behind the latest features in Fabric, right?

It may be outdated, there might be typo's, it might even be wrong in some points.

Instead of (only) complaining, you should do something about it! 😏

Did you know you can edit those pages (make sure you're logged in to your MS Learn account):

After clicking that pencil on a doc page, you end up at GitHub where you can make changes to the document. You do need a GitHub account, know how to fork the repo and create a Pull Request when you're done (if you don't know how to, read this tutorial on GitHub 101).

Microsoft Fabric documentation for admins

Now on to my favorite part: the Admin stuff! 😁

Go to Microsoft Fabric documentation for admins to learn all about admin settings, tools, the admin portal, admin roles, and monitoring and management to name a few.

What is the admin monitoring workspace

The admin monitoring workspace is a specialized environment designed for Fabric administrators to monitor and manage workloads, usage, and governance within their tenant. Using the resources available within the workspace, admins can perform tasks such as security audits, performance monitoring, capacity management, and more.

It recently got a revamp on the design side and now looks way better.

The information contained in the report is on a fairly basic level, but you can still get some good insights out of it.

Next to that, you can also connect to the semantic model and extend it.

Closing

As you see there is a lot of information available on Microsoft Learn.`

Do you think the documentation on Microsoft Learn is valuable? Have you used it?

Does it need improvement? If yes, on what points?

Let me know in the comments!

Changes to the Default Tenant Setting value for SQL Database

Another post on my favorite topic: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

I decided to leave "Governance & Administration" out of the titles of my blog posts from now on.
The titles were getting a bit lengthy, just because I wanted to include the focus on Governance & Administration. I am already using labels which you can use for that: Governance, Administration, etc..

UPDATE 2025-03-12:

Microsoft released an update on the rollout of the changes to this setting. The actual enablement is postponed for 20 days to March 28. The timelines mentioned in the blog below are now:

• February 28, 2025 - Checkbox notification rolled out globally.
• March 8, 2025 -  Infobox will display this as the enablement date.
• March 28, 2025 - Actual enablement date for tenants that take no action.

Extending flexibility: default checkbox changes on tenant settings for SQL database in Fabric

Microsoft 365 Message Center

In case you have access to the M365 Admin Center, or more specific the M365 Message Center, you might have seen this message. I reckon not many people did.. That's why I'm blogging about it here 😁

I'm specifically talking about this message in the Message Center, being a major update and with admin impact: 

Communications on default checkbox changes on tenant settings and billing start for SQL database in Fabric.

Changes to SQL Database Tenant Setting

Recently, there's been a change to the tenant setting for SQL Database, but only in case you haven't changed the setting before.. 😉

Below is the setting in my own tenant, where the setting is still disabled, which was and still is the default option (hint: this is about to change!).

So if I do nothing, then after March 8, the default value will change to ON, or Enabled for the entire organization.

If I decide to opt out before March 8, so if I uncheck the checkbox Accept Microsoft's default selection (Off for the entire organization), this tenant setting will stay disabled, also after March 8.

To be clear, as I mentioned, you only see this message if you haven't changed the default setting (off).

In the Powerdobs tenant we already enabled SQL Database, so I only see the below:

M365 Message Center for Non-Admins

In case you don't have access to the Message Center, I found another site, called the Microsoft 365 Message Center Archive, where all those messages are replicated, set up by Merill Fernando, Principal Product Manager for Microsoft Entra.

Direct link to the message: https://mc.merill.net/message/MC996579.

I have been searching for a (regular) blog post on this topic, but I haven't seen anything:
Multiple other blog posts were written on the Fabric blog, but none of them explicitly mentioned any of this:

• Feb 12: Govern your data in SQL database in Microsoft Fabric with protection policies in Microsoft Purview
  
• Feb 19: Enhancing SQL database in Fabric: share your feedback and shape the future
  
• Feb 26: Why SQL database in Fabric is the best choice for low-code/no-code Developers
• There's a little link to Billing and utilization reporting for SQL database hidden in this blog post, which explains billing started at February 1st, but no mention of the tenant setting

Billing for SQL Database (preview)

Last thing I want to explicitly call out in accordance with the changed tenant setting:

While SQL Database in Fabric is still in preview, billing already started at February 1. Furthermore, billing for backup starts after April 1.

So when the setting is changed to ON, and you don't run a trial, you can start seeing SQLDbNative on your Capacity Metrics App as explained here. 😉

Governance & Administration - Default Domain settings

I'm picking up my favorite topic again: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

Last week I wrote about the rights of the Fabric Administrator.

Today I want to make you aware of a default value of the domain settings inside Fabric.

This default value might not be the best value for you.. 😉

Domains in Fabric

A short introduction to Domains: they are essentially a way of managing and structuring your data across the organization. You can logically group together data in workspaces. A logical grouping can be business units, areas, fields, solutions or actually whatever works for you. It shouldn't be something a Fabric Admin decides on his own. Ideally business and / or enterprise architects with the data owners (if any 😐) should implement the design of domains, subdomains and owners. People from you Center of Excellence (again: if available..) would be a good fit to include in this discussion.

In case you need some help or guidance on how to set up your domains, there's a nice article that can help you get started: Best practices for planning and creating domains.

Default Domain Settings

Check your defaults! I've said it multiple times, always check default settings in your tenant, be it in the tenant settings or the domain settings.

When you create a domain (either with or without adding a domain admin explicitly), you end up with the default settings applied to that domain. Let's check what that involves.

After creating your domain and navigating to the settings you can SHOULD set the Contributors of the domain.

By default, it is set to The entire organization. I would limit it to either of the other options. Preferably tenant and domain admins, but if you have a group of people from Finance that you want to allow to add workspaces to the Finance domain, I'm happy with that too. Just don't use the default setting 😀

Luckily there's one more caveat to this that restricts it to hopefully a sligthly smaller group: the documentation points out you also have to be a workspace admin to be able to use this feature, so that limits it to people that have an admin role in the workspace.

One more reason to not give everyone the admin role in your workspace by default!

Next to that, you can also audit for these changes by checking the audit log for Fabric, specifically the UpdateDataDomainFoldersRelationsAsAdmin operation, which gives you the activities when someone assigns (or unassigns) a workspace to/from a domain.

Conclusion

Domains give you a good option to manage and group the content in your organization.

Just be aware of the default settings when you create one. Set the contributors to the tenant and domain admins, or a security group, just don't use the default!

Let me know what you think, have you seen this default setting and more importantly, did you change it in any of your domains?

Governance & Administration - Fabric Administrator Role

It's been a while since I've written on a regular cadance, so I'm picking up my favorite topic again: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

Today I want to talk to you about the Fabric Administrator (role).

• What rights does an Admin have?
• Are there more people that also have these rights? (Hint: YES! 😉)

Toady, I'm not talking about the governance aspects of the Admin, the Tenant settings or the Admin portal in general. I'll leave that for a next time. Or read other posts, for example by Marc on other roles and controls in Fabric or the delicate balance of governance and collaboration.

Manage Fabric Administrators

Users with this role can manage everything in Fabric, so from the Admin portal, to workspace access, and have also read access to various other parts in the Office and Azure ecosystem.

I encourage you to check who are assigned this role, because it should only be a handful of people in my opinion. You can check this in the Azure portal, under Entra ID > Roles and administrators.

Alternatively you can also search for it in the top search bar and go there directly.

Looking at the description of the role, we can see a few interesting things:

(As an Admin,) You can go to Azure and O365 Service Health to check for potential status issues with those services. You can also check and file (Premium) support tickets, depending on the license/capacity you have.

I especially want to call out the last row in the permissions:

The link there reads: microsoft.powerApps.powerBi/....

Power Platform Administrator

Now let's take a look at the Power Platform Admnistrator role description:

You might have noticed the same path there: microsoft.powerApps.

So this means, everything "below" PowerApps is also accessible, so the Power Platform Admin can also access and manage the same things the Fabric Admin can!

I also encourage you to check the people assigned to this role 😀

Just In Time Access Roles

Depending on your organizational settings, Privileged Identity Management might be enabled.
This means that people might need to activate the Fabric Admin role (for a period of time) before it becomes active. In the below screenshot you can see that Ernst and me have the role permanently assigned for Powerdobs.

But if I'm working as a consultant it usually is on a need-to-have bases, so I can e.g. activate it for 1, 2 or 8 hours. 

Looking at the picture above, you can see that there's Active and Eligible assignments. Depending on the settings and activity, people might have the PIM-role, but not activated at the moment.

Wrap up

To complete the list of access to Fabric, the Global (tenant) Admin role also has access to everything in Fabric:

• Global Admin
• Power Platform Administrator
• Fabric Administrator

People with the above roles have the same rights as the Fabric Admin.

Did you know the Power Platform Administrator has those rights?

Do you think I missed any information in this blog?

Please let me know in the comments below.

Governance & Administration - Ownership Takeover for Fabric Items

It's been a while since I've written on a regular cadance, so I'm picking up my favorite topic again: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

Today I want to quickly show a new feature that was just introduced, but long awaited for!

Ownership takeover for Fabric items!

Yes, you read it right, you can now TAKE OVER OWNERSHIP in Fabric! 😁

In a workspace, go to the ellipsis of the item (the 3 dots), and go to settings.

In the settings of the item you can see the Take over button:

Clicking that will show a pop-up and will start the transfer of ownership.

After a few seconds (that was my experience for the handful items I tried) you will get the notification it succeeded.

After that the (Take over) button has disappeared and will show up for the original (and other) users.

A few things to be aware of:

• You need read and write permissions to the item you want to take over
• That means a Contributor or higher role in the workspace
• Depending on the item you transfer, you might need to set up/refresh credentials for connections, as explained here
• The old way of taking ownership of Power BI items will still remain the same
• Mirrored databases are not supported (yet)
• If you're taking over a pipeline that execute's other items (like a notebook), you have to take over ownership of that item separately

For more info check the MS Learn docs: Take ownership of Fabric items.

Wrap up

This is of course especially helpful when the creator of an item left the company or that account is locked for whatever reason.

What's next you ask? The API for takeover is not yet available, and you also can't switch to a Service Principal yet. It only switches ownership to the current user at this moment.

Have you tried this feature yet?

Let me know what you think!

Closing out on 2024

It's the holiday season again, already!

This year has been marked by significant advancements in Microsoft Fabric, and Power BI in specific, and I've had the privilege of engaging with these developments both personally and professionally.

Blogging

I can say I haven't been that active on my blog, I always have a lot of plans for the new year, but motivation is still not easy.. 😆 Let's not make plans this year, but just start blogging for myself and not for others or the views, and see what that brings.

5th Year MVP

One of the highlights of the year was being recognized once again as a Microsoft MVP. It’s a privilege to be part of this amazing program, and I’m very grateful for the opportunities it provides, to share knowledge, collaborate with brilliant minds, contribute to the data community and create new friendships.

Microsoft Ignite 2024: A Glimpse into the Future

One of the biggest events this year was Microsoft Ignite 2024, held in Chicago. The conference had some great innovations, with the number one being the introduction of Fabric SQL Database (in preview). This developer-friendly, transactional database, based on Azure SQL Database, offers seamless creation of operational (OLTP) databases within Fabric. Its integration with OneLake ensures near-real-time data replication, bridging the gap between transactional and analytical processing. 

Another noteworthy feature introduced was the Metrics Hub (also in preview), setting a new standard in how organizations define, track, and share KPIs. This centralized management system integrates effortlessly with Power BI, promoting consistency and enhanced collaboration across teams. 

Community Engagements and Speaking Opportunities

This year also provided new opportunities to connect with the data community through various speaking engagements. Events like DataGrillen in Germany and the 1st Fabric Conference in Europe were particularly memorable. Sharing insights on topics such as Administration and Governance in Fabric, and engaging in lively discussions with fellow data enthusiasts, was both fulfilling and inspiring. This extended beyond sessions, with early morning runs and social gatherings strengthening the relationships with old and new friends in the community. 

Looking Ahead

As we are moving into the new year, my agenda is already filled with promising developments. The upcoming Fabric February 2025 event in Oslo, Norway, is an occasion that promises to bring together the best minds in the industry. And in March the MVP Summit in Redmond will be another highlight!
It's an exciting time to be part of the data community, and I look forward to continuing this journey with all of you, exploring new technologies, sharing knowledge, and fostering the collaborative spirit that defines our field. 

Thank you for being a part of this year's journey. Wishing you all a great New Year's Eve and an insightful 2025 ahead!

Nicky. Out.

P.S. I should mention that I did use AI to create a summary of events of my blog and my LinkedIn posts. I used that as a basis for this post.

Microsoft Ignite 2024 - My Key Highlights

Last week was the annual Microsoft Ignite conference in Chicago. In this blog, I will take you through my most important highlights of the sessions.

Fabric SQL Database (Preview): The future of SQL in the cloud

Let's get straight to the point with the biggest announcement: Fabric SQL Database! 

SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric is a developer-friendly, transactional database, based on Azure SQL Database, with which you can easily create an operational (OLTP) database in Fabric. In addition to the Fabric Lakehouse and the Warehouse, you now also have an efficient SaaS SQL database at your disposal as a developer with the performance of a transactional database and under the hood a(n extra) storage that is optimized for analytical purposes (Delta Parquet).

SQL Database in Fabric is:

• The home of OLTP workloads in Fabric
• Easy to configure and manage
• Set up for analytics by automatically replicating data to OneLake in near-real-time
• Based on the underlying technology of Mirroring in Fabric
• Under the hood, the same as Azure SQL Database, plus you have a web-based editor in the Fabric portal

With the introduction of Fabric SQL Database, Microsoft is taking traditional database management to a new level:

• Simple and secure architecture: Automated management and scaling optimizations
• Source control integration and CI/CD support: Essential for modern DevOps processes
• Capacity billing: Pausable compute resources ensure cost efficiency
• Unique cross-platform capabilities: Perform JOINs across databases, warehouses, and lakehouses

In addition to SQL Database in Fabric, the next version of SQL Server was also announced: SQL Server 2025. It is currently in Private Preview. It also supports mirroring to Fabric.

Metrics Hub: Standardized Metric management in Fabric (Preview)

The introduction of the Metrics Hub in Fabric is a new standard in how organizations define, track, and share KPIs. This new approach integrates seamlessly with Power BI and provides centralized management for metrics, enabling consistency and better collaboration. You might be thinking, this sounds familiar? You are! 😊 First there was Metrics, then Goals, and now the Metrics Hub where you can create Metric sets.

The advantage of being able to create and share metrics centrally is that you still have that one single version of the truth. Users can then use these measures in Power BI reports. But developers and data scientists can also use them in notebooks, using Semantic Link (Labs)!

Fabric AI Capacities

There will be an option to run all AI (=Copilot) compute on a separate capacity, so that other Fabric workloads are not affected by the use of Copilot. You still need at least an F64, and it's not available in all Azure regions, so be sure to check the Copilot FAQ for all your questions.

Fabric Org Apps

Org apps is a new item in your workspace, which now allows you to create an app as you did before by publishing an App in your workspace. One of the benefits of this is that you can create multiple Org apps per workspace!

In addition, you can customize more things like the design and behavior of the app. However, you can still only add items from the current workspace.

It is important to know that there is a tenant setting for Org apps that you need to activate. You can also use Org apps with a trial capacity.

Some other important updates for org apps compared to workspace apps:

• In addition to Power BI reports, you can now also add Fabric notebooks and real-time dashboards
• The distribution of org apps has been simplified, because access to underlying items (e.g. semantic models) is also applied, even in other workspaces. Users will therefore receive read access to all items that are dependent on the items in the app. These rights will also be removed when a user is deleted. There are a few exceptions, so check this.
• The items in an Org app are no longer a copy of the item, but the original items from the workspace
• Check all the differences between workspace and Org apps here

This week, an extensive blog about Org apps was also published where you can find even more information.

Power BI

• The biggest update by far: write-back with User Data Functions: native write-back integration with reusable functions and new options to link these to buttons in Power BI, with which you can update data in a source
• In the Pipeline activity, you can now refresh a semantic model at table and partition level
• Dataflow Gen2 updates: this item will soon also be supported in CI/CD (in source control and deployment pipelines)

OneLake

At the heart of Fabric is OneLake, a single central repository for all data, regardless of format. Some new developments:

• Shortcuts with Iceberg tables: Direct integrations with Snowflake and other platforms
• Mirroring: Support for Azure SQL and Snowflake (GA)
• Cross-cloud JOINs: Analyze datasets spread across different clouds and formats: You can combine SQL Database, Lakehouses and Warehouses in one query
• Open mirroring (preview): this allows you to write change data from any application directly into a mirrored database in Fabric. Open mirroring is based on the open Delta Lake table format

Platform

• Workspace monitoring (not to be confused with the Admin Monitoring workspace, this is intended for tenant insights): a database in your workspace that records log data and metrics about all items in that workspace. All of this is recorded in a real-time intelligence Eventhouse database. There are example queries in the Fabric samples GitHub. 
• Surge protection for capacities: This capability is coming soon, and it allows you to set a cap on the background workload of a capacity. This helps to better guarantee the availability of interactive workloads (such as Power BI report usage). You can set this per capacity.
• OneLake catalog: This is the new central hub to find, search, and use all Fabric items. You can use all available filters, including new ones like domains and tags. You can explore in-place items and view details.

Conclusion

Ignite 2024 showed that Microsoft is strongly committed to an integrated and future-oriented data platform, with AI and Copilot as a common thread. Innovations such as workspace monitoring, improved security through service principal support, and the advanced capabilities of the OneLake Catalog make it easier than ever to manage data effectively.

I believe that with these developments, the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform is ready to support organizations in an increasingly data-intensive world.

Do you have any highlights from Ignite that I missed? Then let me know in the comments!


Items that are being worked on now and in the future are often public via the Fabric roadmap. There you can find per workload the items that will be worked on in the coming 6-12 months.

Some examples:

• A new Fabric navigation experience
• Support for folders for Git integration
• Better ownership of Fabric items
• Fabric Capacity Metrics Cross-capacity insights
• Capacity Metrics Chargeback