Fabric - April 2025 GA Feature summary

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As we go into May, last months update list has landed and it's time to go through what's new and what's worth knowing about. Given the volume of updates we're getting now, I'm going to keep splitting out my thoughts into:


First up, general updates.

General

The big news this month is the removal of the F64 requirement to get access to Copilot. I know a lot of people have been asking about this and Microsoft have delivered.

For those in the UK, please do remember that enabling Copilot means allowing out of region data transfers to be able to get the payloads to the Paris DC for OpenAI processing. I know it's ridiculous, but as far as I can work it out it's another Brexit "benefit". The risk you are taking on by doing this is that data could be sent to the US in some rare scenarios (confirmed by Microsoft). Hopefully we'll get some GPU capacity in the UK to mitigate this risk, but do check with your compliance teams before enabling copilot if you are based in the UK.

Data Warehouse

ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN and sp_rename support

Another pair of features that should have been part of GA for Data Warehouses, but at least we have them. The ALTER TABLE command has the impact on time travel history in that it is truncated to the point the metadata was changed, and both of these commands can't be used against Lakehouse tables.

Session scoped #temp table

Another feature that should have been part of MVP. With temp tables we can now create two types of tables. The first is the standard mdf back table and this is created using the SQL we're all used to by now.

The second is a distributed, parquet backed, temp table. These are created by adding the following after the closing bracket of our temp table definition:

WITH (DISTRIBUTION = ROUND_ROBIN);

These are typically used when data is going to be insert into either temp or physical tables downstream. For more info on this new function, check out this blog.


OPENROWSET and BULK INSERT

I'm going to assume that you know these functions, and yes these are more features that should have been MVP but at least it's GA now. If you don't know what these functions are, checkout the April release notes for more info.

Real-Time Intelligence (RTI)

We get two new OpenAI plugins to support RAG applications or augment data analysis. These are:
  • ai_embeded_text. This allows you to integrate the embedding models from OpenAI to generate vectors from your inbound text fields.
  • ai_chat_completion. Enables chat completions using OpenAI models, enhancing analysis done within KQL databases.

Improvements to low code data exploration experience

We now have:
  • A hierarchal columns pane to help with data profiling.
  • A new focused mode to expand either the data viz or results grid.
  • Right-click actions on the results grid.
  • Filter builder with Or conditions.
  • Improved datetime picker

Eventhouse/KQL in-item monitoring

We have additional enhancements to improve system visibility and performance monitoring. These are:
  • Eventhouse ingested rows over time. Making it easier to monitor the number of records that have been ingested.
  • New tab for top 10 ingested databases. Showing the number of rows and failures ingested by database.
  • Top 10 queried databases. Showing the number of queries, errors, duration, and cache misses by database.
  • Eventhouse details have moved to the menu bar
The big one in this section is a demo if the weather connector added last month.


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