Microsoft Fabric - Feb 2025 update

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Firstly, sorry this one's late. Life's been busy and only just getting back up to speed with what I'm now allowed to talk about.

Looking back at what was announced in Feb, we start with Power BI


Power BI

The real major news is that the 32bit version of Power BI desktop will go out of suppot on 2025-06-30. If you are still using this, you need to upgrade to the 64 bit version asap.

Other than that, a couple of copilot features have been added to add tablet support to the mobile app and to open the black box on how copilot has found insight. The second of these is a big one, being able to understand the data, measures, and filters that copilot has used is a massive step forwards in increasing confidence in results. Combine this with the new explore this visual option, copilot is getting more and more powerful.

Fabric platform

This month we see improvements to goverment of the estate within Fabric. Whilst it isn't to the same level as Purview is/will be (e.g. No DQ reports, Copilot promt governance, etc), it's good to see an entry level amount of governance within the platform alongside a roadmap for Purview that encourages a worth while purchase of that product. Seems like MSFT are listening to feedback in this space, so will be interesting to see what happens the rest of this year.

Lastly in this section we're seeing new API functions being added to help remotely manage the platform. My money is that we'll see these rolled into the Teraform capabilities soon.

OneLake

Minor changes to Databricks mirroring. I susects that this will impact very few given it's still a preview feature.

Still no noise on OneLake's new security model that everyone is waiting for. Hopefully we'll hear something soon.

Data engineering

Again another section that doesn't have massives of news. The two highlightes are code snippets and CI/CD for T-sql notebooks for those using a warehouse.

Ignoring the usual complaint that CI/CD should have been in the MVP, it seems like this is now changing and we should get less and less of these CI/CD announcements.

For me, the code snippets are great. Whilst seniors will probably not use them as much, for juniors being able to see how certain challlenges should be solved whilst being independent is always a good thing.

Monitoring

Whilst this is in the data engineering section, for me this should be pulled out into its own section.

This months release are mostly UX enhancements to make it easier to do things like spot errors in logs through colour highlights and filtering. The big one that will make debugging easier is linking spark jobs and stages to notebooks, and spark resource analysis going GA.

Data science

The main changes this month are changes to AI skills. As of the latest updates we can now bring up to 5 Fabric items that the AI skill can query and changes to the UI have been made to make the UX much more conversational. Having this native in Fabric, combined with the URI of a published model, so help increase adoption. Previously having to build a chat bot to serve the data to consumers meant these had limited use.



That's pretty much it of value for the majority in Feb's blog, and for me this is a good thing. With releases becoming smaller, it should help boost confidence in the maturity of the platform. Let's hope this continues, but I suspect it's a result of Fabcon coming at the start of April.

Speaking of which, stay tuned to get some initial thoughts post the 1st days keynote. 

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