The European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference brought a lot of exciting news to the table, and if you’re a Microsoft Fabric user like me, you’ll be thrilled about what’s coming. At Coeo, our customers often ask similar questions about Microsoft Fabric. These new features aim to provide even more powerful, secure, and user-friendly solutions to those frequently asked questions.
Let’s dive in and look at some of the most common questions we hear and how these new features can make a difference.
How does Fabric keep my data secure?
Security has always been a key focus of Microsoft Fabric, and it already has a variety of features to control access to your data and keep it safe. But now, things are getting even better. Two significant enhancements, trusted workspace access and managed private endpoints, are now generally available across all Fabric SKUs, not just the higher tiers like F64.
What does this mean for you? Whether you’re accessing data within Azure through OneLake or working within Fabric, these features provide an extra layer of security, ensuring your data is protected and accessible only by trusted users.
Can I use Git and Azure DevOps to manage my Fabric projects?
Yes, you can! Integration with Git via Azure DevOps and GitHub is now generally available. This is a big deal because it means we can manage version control and changes to our data pipelines, notebooks, lakehouses, warehouses, reports, and more, all using Git.
But that’s not all! While Direct Lake models don’t support Git just yet, they do have a new version history feature that feels very familiar to the experience you find in Office 365. Both features will really enhance the way we manage our Fabric environments by offering more control over changes and collaboration across teams.
Is migrating my existing workloads to Fabric a smooth process?
Yes, and it’s easier than ever! Migrating existing Azure Data Factory (ADF) pipelines into Fabric has been streamlined. You can now link your existing ADF pipelines directly to your Fabric workspace, fully managing your ADF factories from within the Fabric UI. Plus, there’s an open-source GitHub project that can help convert your ADF pipelines into native Fabric pipelines.
And for the SQL fans out there, we’re especially excited about T-SQL notebooks, which are now in public preview. With these, you can run T-SQL queries on a Fabric data warehouse or SQL analytics endpoint, visualise results in real-time, and document your analytical processes all in one place.
Things get even better with Copilot for Data Warehouse. This AI-powered assistant helps you generate T-SQL queries, explain existing queries with in-line comments, fix broken code, and even answer questions about data warehousing. It’s like having a SQL expert sitting beside you, helping to create high-quality notebooks.
What’s the best way to share reports across my organisation?
Organisational apps in Power BI are an easy way to securely package and distribute reports across your organisation. But Power BI has always had the limitation of one app per workspace. Meaning that it could be difficult to share a single copy of a report with multiple audiences. But now the feature we’ve been waiting for is finally here you can create multiple apps in each workspace, which means you can share a single version of a report with different audiences.
This level of control lets you create a seamless user experience, making it easier than ever to get reports into the hands of those who need them.
How will Fabric help give people access to the data they need?
Many organisations aim to provide their teams with a “single version of the truth” and enable self-service access to data. Features, like certified and promoted semantic models in Power BI, have been key to letting users know that the data they’re using is reliable.
Now, the new Metrics Hub takes things up a notch. It allows users to discover, promote, and standardise metrics across the organisation, making it easier to find and use trusted data. Business logic from Power BI can be baked right into these metrics, and creators can organise them into collections, certify them, and promote them for easy access. These certified metrics aren’t just for Power BI reports either, they can be reused in other Fabric solutions, like Notebooks, ensuring consistency and data quality throughout your organisation.
These new features in Microsoft Fabric show just how much Microsoft is listening to its users and focusing on making the platform even more accessible, secure, and collaborative. From enhanced security features to better version control and seamless migration paths, there’s something for everyone in these updates.
At Coeo we are really looking forward to seeing how these new tools help our customers get even more value out of Microsoft Fabric. Find out how we can help you get started. As a Microsoft Specialist Data and AI Partner for a limited time, we’re able to offer funded transformative analytics workshops. Click here to find out more about our Microsoft Fabric Proof of Concept Workshop.
What new feature are you most excited about?