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A ton of new features for Microsoft Fabric were announced at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference. Here are all the new features I am aware of, with some released now and others coming soon:
- Mirroring is now in public preview for Cosmos DB, Azure SQL DB and Snowflake. See Announcing the Public Preview of Database Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric
- You get a free terabyte of Mirroring storage for replicas for every capacity unit (CU) you have purchased and provisioned. For example, if you purchase F64, you will get sixty-four free terabytes worth of storage for your mirrored replicas
- You can now access on-premises data using the on-premises Data Gateway in Data Factory pipelines. See Integrating On-Premises Data into Microsoft Fabric Using Data Pipelines in Data Factory
- You can have folders in the Workspace view. See Announcing Folder in Workspace in Public Preview
- Improving the Microsoft Fabric’s CI/CD experience. This improvement includes support for data pipelines and data warehouses in Fabric Git integration and deployment pipelines. Spark job definition and Spark environment will become available in Git integration. Microsoft is also giving you the ability to easily branch out a workspace integrated into Git with just a couple of clicks to help you reduce the time to code. Additionally, because many organizations already have robust CI/CD processes established in tools such as Azure DevOps, Fabric will also support both Fabric Git integration APIs as well as Fabric deployment pipelines APIs, enabling you to integrate Fabric into these familiar CI/CD tools. All of these updates will be launched in a preview experience in early April. See Data Factory Adds CI/CD to Fabric Data Pipelines
- Fast Copy in Dataflows Gen2, where you can ingest a large amount of data using the same data movement backend as the “copy” activity in data pipelines
- A feature coming soon that will give you the ability to add tags to Fabric items and manage them for enhanced compliance, discoverability, and reuse
- A new Microsoft Fabric feature called task flows. Task flows can help you visualize a data project from end-to-end
- Security admins will soon be able to define Purview Information Protection policies in Microsoft Fabric to automatically enforce access permissions to sensitive information in Fabric
- Coming soon is the extension of Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies to Fabric, enabling security teams to automatically identify the upload of sensitive information to Fabric and trigger automatic risk remediation actions. The DLP policies will initially work with Fabric Lakehouses with support for other Fabric workloads to follow. See Extend your data security to Microsoft Fabric
- In preview is the ability for organizations to create subdomains, the ability to set default domains for security groups, the ability to use public admin APIs, and more. See Easily implement data mesh architecture with domains in Fabric
- Released in preview is the ability to create shortcuts to the Google Cloud Platform
- Released in preview is the ability to create shortcuts to cloud-based S3 compatible data sources and, coming soon, on-premise S3 compatible data sources (these sources include Cloudflare, Qumulo, MinIO, Dell ECS, and many more)
- Introducing an external data-sharing experience for Microsoft Fabric data and artifacts, helping make collaboration easier and more fruitful across organizations. Fabric external data sharing, coming soon, enables you to share data and assets with external organizations such as business partners, customers, and vendors in an easy, quick, and secure manner. Because this experience is built on top of OneLake’s shortcut capabilities, you can share data in place from OneLake storage locations without copying the data. External users can access it in their Fabric tenant, combine it with their data, and work with it across any Fabric experience and engine
- Coming soon is a metrics layer in Fabric which allows organizations to create standardized business metrics that are rooted in measures and are discoverable and intended for reuse. Trusted creators can select Power BI measures to promote to metrics and even include descriptions, dimensions, and other metadata to help users better understand how they should be applied and interpreted. When looking through the metrics, users can preview and explore the simplified semantic model in a simple UI before using it in their solution. These metrics can not only be used in reports, scorecards, and Power BI solutions but also in other artifacts across Fabric, such as data science notebooks
- Later in the year, Microsoft will release the ability to live edit Direct Lake semantic models in the Fabric service right from Power BI Desktop, so you can work with data directly from OneLake
- In preview is the ability to connect to over a hundred data sources and create paginated reports right from the Power BI Report Builder
- In preview is the new ability to create Power BI reports in the Fabric web service by simply connecting to your Excel and CSV files with relationship detection enabled
- To save you time when you are building reports, in preview Microsoft has created new visuals for calculations and are introducing a new way for you to create and edit a custom date table without writing any Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) formulas
- In preview you can generate mobile-optimized layouts for any report page to help everyone view insights even on the go
- In Explorer, Microsoft added a new “Data overview” button which provides a summary, powered by Copilot, of the semantic model to help users get started. This feature will be released in preview in early April and will roll out to regions gradually
- In preview is the ability for Copilot to help you write and explain DAX queries in the DAX query view
- Coming soon is a new generative AI feature in Fabric that will enable custom Q&A experiences for your data. You can simply select the data source in Fabric you want to explore and immediately start asking questions about your data—even without any configuration. When answering questions, the generative AI experience will show the query it generated to find the answer and you can enhance the Q&A experience by adding more tables, setting additional context, and configuring settings. Data professionals can use this experience to learn more about their data or it could even be embedded into apps for business users to query
- More new Fabric features are at Microsoft Fabric March 2024 Update
- And for specific Power BI changes, check out Power BI March 2024 Feature Summary
More info:
Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference
The post Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference first appeared on James Serra's Blog.