October '25 - Power Bi and Fabric GA updates

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This month's releases are, thankfully, a lot smaller than previous months. Without further adu, it's time to press on with looking at the GA features.


Fabric

Platform updates

UI/UX improvements

This month we have a couple of minor changes to make life easier. These are:
  • keyboard shortcut support for horizontal tabs and object explorer
  • Focus mode to maximise editing space
These sorts of improvements are always welcome, but Microsoft do need to make sure they rollout features quicker - for example my Sandbox enviroment doesn't have the hoizontal tabs still.

Outbound Access Protection for Spark

This is one of the big announcements  this month for me. For those that don't know what outbound access protection is, it ultimately allows security and governance teams to put rules in place that control the destinations data can be sent to from a workspace.

Whilst we have had this function in the platform for a while, Lakehouses haven't been included in the supported list. Given how many customers today use Lakehouses that has been quite a gap that has now been sorted.

Workspace-level private link

This is the other big announcement. Previously, private links have been applied at the tenant level meaning that either the entire platform is public facing or internal facing.

With workspace level support, we can now seggregate our set-up. It's possible for our workspaces containing data stores to only be accessed via the private link, whilst Power BI reports can still be accessed via the public URL for the service.

Data Engineering

Adaptive Target File Size

This feature isn't called out as in public preview, so we have to assume Microsoft are classing it as GA.

Within Spark Microsoft have added the ability for Fabric to work out the right file sizes for parquet. Combining this with the auto-compaction announced the other month, this should help optimise platform performance without a dedicated DBA being required to undertake this type of work.

That doesn't mean you don't need that skill set, but instead they can focus on governance and testing new versions of the Fabric engine.

Spark connector for Microsoft Fabric Spark runtime

This month a number of improvements to this have been made, do have a look if this is relevant for you.

Spark executor rolling logs

The updates for this are to split the logs to make them easier to manage. When logs reach a specific size limit or run time (16MB or 1 hr) the engine now splits them into separate segments.

Table deep links in Lakehouse explorer

You can now share a URL to a specific Lakehouse table, making it easier to share specific data products with other developers.

Data Agent integration in Lakehouse

Shortcuts to creating/adding to an agent now appear within the Lakehouse explorer. Making it less frictious to build data agents.

Data science

UI/UX improvements for Data Agents

This month we've had a couple of changes to the UX for building agents:
  • New tabs (Data and setup) to make it easier to test and refine agents.
  • A new markdown view for creating agents instead of using the previous UX. Microsoft claims that using markdown results in a more reliable agent that is easier to maintain.

Data Warehouse

New formats supported by OPENROWSET

The OPENROWSET function in Fabric Warehouses now natively supports JSONL files and other files stored within OneLake (through creating data sources).

Improved concurrency

Changes have been made to the engine to reduce the chance of deadlocks occuring due to underlying parquet files being compacted at the same time.

Data Factory

Copy job enhancements

New file formats are now supported in copy job.

Dataflow Gen2 variable library support

Changes have been made to the way variable libraries work in Dataflow Gen2 to add gateway and power query editor support. For those using this integration, make sure to check out the architecture guide.

Power BI

This month's updates are relatively minor. A quick rundown of what we have seen are:
  • Bing map deprecation plan
  • Copilot support in DAX query view
  • The new button slicer goes GA
  • Power BI support on ARM based Windows devices
  • Usual 3rd party viz updates
If any of that is relevant to you, do go check out this months Power BI release blog.

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