Fabric - May '25 GA feature summary

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Alongside all the key announcements from build, we've had this months may update drop.


In this blog, I'm going to focus on the features that have gone GA and aren't covered by my keynote announcement. I'll also drop a separate post for all the features that are still in preview. As always, please do double check that a feature you want to use is definately GA (the Microsoft blog's aren't always clear).


Before we start on features, the first announcement is the new Fabric roadmap. Personally, I like the fact we can now see which quarter features are due to go GA - it's a big improvement. Slight grumble on how sparse the GA plans are, but hopefully that's because it's a new tool and we'll start to see more announcements going forwards.


Up first, platform changes.


Platform

New rest APIs and service principal (SPN) support

This month we now get a bunch of new APIs to make sure that we're nearly at feature parity with Power BI (only the admin APIs to go). The ones that have been released cover deployment pipelines and allow us to manage:

  • Pipelines
  • Stages
  • Workspace assignment 
  • Role assignment
All of this can be done using a SPN, simplifying the devOps process in the platform.

Improvements to AzureDevOps (ADO) integration

For those using ADO, you also get SPN support as well as cross-tenant support.

Real-Time intelligence (RTI)

Get Data in Fabric Eventhouse from Lakehouse using OneLake Catalog

This one seems to be a minor UI improvement to make it easier to find a lakehouse that you want to pull data from to integrate into an eventhouse. Nothing major, but more of a nice touch.

Eventhouse Accelerated OneLake Table Shortcuts

Before this update, if you used a shortcut to pull data into an eventhouse from OneLake the performance could be pretty poor. By turning this option on Fabric creates the necessary indexes and caches that the Eventhouse needs to be performant.

If you are using shortcuts in your eventhouses today, make sure you go turn this on.


Databases

Copilot for data pipeline

Now that we have copilot availble for all Fabric capacities, it's definately a feature worh exploring. As with all copilot features, do remember that if you are in the UK you have to enable out of region processing and accept the risk that data goes to the US (if anyone from MSFT is reading this, please treat the UK as part of Europe on this given we have an equivalency agreement under GDPR).

This month's update make is easuer to update descriptions for pipelines and activities based on its summary. With this in place, hopefully we'll start to see more and more devs implement these (and keep them up to date).

Dataflows (Gen2)

Natural language to custom column

Beyond the GA features in my blog post, we get this hidden little gem. When I used to develop PBI reports, I remember how difficult it was trying to swtich between DAX and M (normally it would be looking stuff up constantly).

Having copilot in the custom column feature means that you no longer need to learn M off by heart - but that doesn't mean you can get away without learning it full stop.

Community

Power designer

Hidden away at the bottom of the Fabric blog is a massive feature for PBI designers - PowerBI.tips. At last a native PBI designer! I didn't even know this one existed until I got to the bottom of the blog.

Time to go away and have a play :) 

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