2026-W42

Oct 12, 2026 – Oct 18, 2026 · 14 articles · 0 low-priority · latest →

API Automation · 1

Fabric App functions to use secure server-side custom logic (Preview)

Fabric Updates Oct 13, 2026 3/5 · Tier B API AutomationGovernanceAI Readiness announcement

<p><strong>Fabric App functions</strong> add TypeScript-based server-side logic to Fabric Apps without separately provisioning backend infrastructure. Functions can execute business rules, call external APIs, access protected resources, orchestrate AI workflows, and manage secrets outside the browser.</p><p>Application authentication lets a function access downstream services as the application rather than the signed-in user. Local debugging uses Azure Functions Core Tools, while deployment packages the app and functions together. The extract does not specify preview limitations, quotas, or separate execution costs.</p>

Preview server-side functions add secure identity, secrets, integrations, and AI orchestration to Fabric Apps.

Capacity · 2

Power BI October 2026 Feature Summary

Power BI Updates Oct 15, 2026 5/5 · Tier A CapacitySemantic Model release-notes

<p>7 features - 1 must-know - 4 worth knowing.</p><ul><li>More accurate surge protection with semantic models</li></ul>

1 must-know of 7 features

A new look and new capabilities in the Capacity Metrics App (Preview)

Fabric Updates Oct 12, 2026 5/5 · Tier A Capacity announcement

<p>The <strong>Capacity Metrics app</strong> preview adds redesigned health, compute, storage, and item-detail experiences for diagnosing capacity pressure and throttling.</p><p>Administrators can compare throttling time across capacities, inspect hourly utilization patterns, and identify the items contributing most to a selected period. Compute usage is shown in <strong>CU seconds</strong> alongside throttling state, with smoothed consumption highlighting the highest-impact items.</p><p>The item-details page adds a 14-day history of an individual item's capacity impact. Because metric behavior has changed, the preview installs alongside the existing generally available app rather than replacing it immediately.</p>

Preview metrics materially improve capacity diagnosis, throttling analysis, workload attribution, and operational capacity management.

CI/CD · 1

Building CI/CD maturity for report development

Tabular Editor Oct 13, 2026 4/5 · Tier A CI/CDSemantic ModelReport Authoring deep-dive

<p><strong>CI/CD for report development</strong> is presented as an incremental maturity ladder rather than an enterprise-only practice. Moving from PBIX files toward PBIP, TMDL, Git, separate environments, and automated checks makes changes smaller, reviewable, reversible, and safer for human or AI-assisted development.</p><p>Deployment pipelines move content between workspaces but do not, by themselves, provide source history or configurable quality gates. Stronger practices add best-practice scans, measure validation, visual checks, regression testing, and deployment failures when quality checks do not pass.</p>

The maturity ladder connects PBIP, Git, environments, automated validation, and deployment practices to safer report delivery.

Delta & Parquet · 1

File Data Ingestion with Materialized Lake Views in Microsoft Fabric (Preview)

Fabric Updates Oct 13, 2026 4/5 · Tier A Delta & ParquetData QualityGovernance announcement

<p><strong>File data ingestion with Materialized Lake Views</strong> is available in preview. A view can read CSV or Parquet files directly from a OneLake <strong>Files</strong> folder using <code>USING OneLake_Files</code>, materialize the result as a Delta table, and feed downstream bronze, silver, and gold views.</p><p>Recursive folder discovery, <code>__filepath__</code> source traceability, CSV header and delimiter options, and dependency-ordered refresh are built in. <strong>DYNAMIC</strong> schema mode accommodates evolving landing files, while <strong>FIXED</strong> mode rejects schema drift and protects downstream contracts. Current scope is limited to CSV and Parquet, and the capability remains preview.</p><p>Data quality constraints can be applied in downstream views, while lineage exposes the source folder, discovered files, processed-file counts, and added rows. A full refresh supports reprocessing an entire folder when incremental append behavior is insufficient.</p>

Substantive preview adds declarative CSV and Parquet ingestion, schema controls, lineage, quality rules, and refresh behavior.

Governance · 3

Fabric Policies: Granular governance at scale (Preview)

Fabric Updates Oct 15, 2026 3/5 · Tier B GovernanceCapacityAPI Automation announcement

<p><strong>Fabric Policies</strong> are a preview governance layer that defines what actions are allowed, to whom and where, scoped to the tenant or to an individual capacity. Policies are grouped into <strong>Policy Sets</strong>. Only one Policy Set can be active per tenant or per capacity, and activating a replacement swaps the governing definitions.</p><p>Three areas are governed today:</p><ul><li><strong>Item creation by capacity</strong>: any Fabric item type, but Power BI items are not yet enforced.</li><li><strong>Security-sensitive workspace settings</strong>: outbound access protection, inbound access protection and CMK.</li><li><strong>External data sharing</strong>: coming soon, with conditions on sharer, source workspace, sensitivity label and recipient domain.</li></ul><p>Each policy is <strong>Allow all</strong>, <strong>Block all</strong> or <strong>Advanced</strong>. Advanced uses an allow-based model. All conditions in a rule must match, a match on any complete rule allows the action, and anything unmatched is blocked.</p><p>Policies never grant roles or permissions. They add a governance decision on top of existing access. Item creation must pass both the tenant item creation setting and the active policy. Editing a Policy Set follows workspace roles, while activation requires Fabric admin (tenant scope) or capacity admin (capacity scope). Management is available through Policies Center in the OneLake Catalog, the M365 Audit Log and REST APIs.</p>

Capacity-scoped item creation control changes rollout governance; preview with clear allow-based semantics.

Workspace-level private link for SQL database in Microsoft Fabric (Preview)

Fabric Updates Oct 14, 2026 2/5 · Tier B GovernanceWarehouse announcement

<p><strong>SQL database in Fabric</strong> now works in preview inside workspaces secured with <strong>workspace-level private link</strong>. The workspace maps to a specific VNet through Azure Private Link. When inbound public access is restricted, the workspace is reachable only through the approved private endpoint, while other workspaces in the tenant stay on public access.</p><p>Setup has two parts. First, create the Azure Private Link resources. Then, in Workspace settings > Inbound network, choose <strong>Allow connections from selected networks and workspace-level private links</strong>.</p><p>The post gives no limitations, performance notes or cost details beyond the standard private endpoint setup.</p>

Bare preview: SQL database now works in workspace-level private link workspaces.

My workspace governance improvements (Generally Available)

Fabric Updates Oct 13, 2026 4/5 · Tier A GovernanceAPI Automation announcement

<p><strong>My workspace governance controls</strong> are generally available, including in government clouds. Administrators can now grant a 24-hour temporary access window to a user’s personal workspace or revoke it early through REST APIs.</p><p>Fabric administrators or authorized service principals can call these APIs, enabling repeatable investigation, retention, and recovery workflows instead of manual Admin Portal operations. Deleted users’ orphaned My workspaces remain recoverable for 30 days; restoration requires a new workspace name and a newly assigned administrator.</p>

GA APIs make temporary My workspace administration programmable, including service-principal automation and orphaned workspace recovery.

Migration · 2

Databricks ADBC connector for Power BI and Microsoft Fabric (Generally Available)

Power BI Updates Oct 15, 2026 4/5 · Tier A MigrationSemantic ModelBreaking Change announcement

<p>The <strong>Databricks ADBC driver</strong> is GA for the Databricks and Azure Databricks Power Query connectors. It replaces the embedded <strong>Simba Spark ODBC</strong> driver. The Power BI service will move from ODBC to ADBC through Q1 2027, so opt-in now means mandatory later.</p><p>ADBC is Arrow-native and fetches large result sets with minimal serialization or copying. It supports OAuth (user), OAuth M2M and Entra ID authentication.</p><p>There are three opt-in levels:</p><ul><li><strong>Per connection</strong>: add <strong>Implementation="2.0"</strong> to the Databricks.Catalogs source step. Use "1.0" to force ODBC for side-by-side comparison.</li><li><strong>Per workspace</strong>: a workspace admin override.</li><li><strong>Tenant-wide</strong>: the admin setting "Users can connect to data sources by using Apache Arrow database connectivity (ADBC)".</li></ul><p>Existing semantic models, dataflows and paginated reports remain unchanged until switched. Separately installed ODBC drivers are unaffected.</p>

Forced ODBC-to-ADBC driver switch for Databricks connectors by Q1 2027; validate now.

Amazon Redshift V2 Connector for Microsoft Data Factory

Power BI Updates Oct 13, 2026 2/5 · Tier B MigrationBreaking Change announcement

<p><strong>Amazon Redshift connectors</strong> across Microsoft data products are transitioning to the Amazon Redshift ODBC 2.x driver. The change rolls out automatically by region and adds external-object metadata visibility, Redshift Data Sharing reads, newer Redshift feature support, and connection auditing.</p><p>The transition affects Fabric Copy jobs, Copy pipelines, Dataflows Gen2, semantic models, Power BI Desktop, gateways, and related integrations. Customers wanting earlier testing can enable preview features, but the extract provides no detailed compatibility matrix or rollback procedure.</p>

Automatic Redshift driver migration improves connectivity but requires validation across Fabric, Power BI, and gateway workloads.

Real-Time Intelligence · 1

What’s new for Business Events and real-time events in Microsoft Fabric

Fabric Updates Oct 12, 2026 5/5 · Tier A Real-Time IntelligenceCapacityGovernance release-notes

<p>8 features - 4 must-know - 4 worth knowing.</p><ul><li>Find the operations driving capacity pressure (Preview)</li><li>Turn business meaning into a governed event (Generally Available)</li><li>Process, act, and analyze without changing the publisher</li><li>Monitor capacity health as events occur (Generally Available)</li></ul>

4 must-know of 8 features

Semantic Model · 1

Monitoring The Impact Of Full-Text Indexing On Semantic Model Refresh In Power BI

Crossjoin Oct 18, 2026 4/5 · Tier A Semantic ModelAI Readiness deep-dive

<p><strong>Full-text indexing</strong> (September Power BI release) is enabled per text column and speeds up text search and filtering. It also powers the new <strong>TextContains()</strong> and <strong>TextSimilarity()</strong> DAX functions. The index rebuilds during a <strong>Full</strong> refresh or a refresh of type <strong>Indexes</strong>.</p><p>The build is visible in a Profiler trace as a <strong>Progress Report Begin/End</strong> pair with subclass <strong>Tabular Object Processing</strong>. Its TextData reads "Finished building persisted full-text index for column..." and the Duration and CPUTime columns give the cost.</p><p>The test case was a Street column with 73,206 distinct values in a 160,257-row table, built in 1,392 ms using 484 ms of CPU. Longer strings and higher cardinality will cost more. The docs warn that indexing too many text columns can significantly slow refresh.</p><p>Power BI reports cannot use these indexes yet. They are aimed at arbitrary-DAX front ends and "chat with your data" agents, for example finding feedback text that mentions air conditioning.</p>

Measured full-text index build cost in refresh; Profiler events to monitor it.

Warehouse · 1

Custom SQL Pools in Fabric Data Warehouse (Generally Available)

Fabric Updates Oct 12, 2026 5/5 · Tier A WarehouseCapacity announcement

<p><strong>Custom SQL Pools</strong> are generally available in Fabric Data Warehouse, giving administrators explicit control over how compute resources are allocated among workloads.</p><p>Separate pools can protect ingestion, reporting, and ad hoc analysis from one another by applying maximum resource-allocation percentages. Statement-type classification separates distributed <strong>SELECT</strong> requests from <strong>NONSELECT</strong> loading and modification statements; each starts with a 50% maximum, and the combined limits cannot exceed 100%.</p><p>Application-name and regular-expression classifiers remain available when statement type does not reflect the required workload boundary. Custom pools complement, rather than replace, Fabric Warehouse's autonomous workload-management behavior.</p>

General availability adds explicit workload isolation and statement classification for predictable Fabric Warehouse resource allocation.