Power Apps or Translytical Task Flows?

I think I have gotten this question at least five or six times in the last few months, and with Translytical Task Flows reaching GA in the March 2026 Power BI update, I expect it to come up even more. So let me write it down once and for all.

The question usually sounds something like: "We want users to be able to add comments or update values in their Power BI report. Should we use Power Apps or this new Translytical Task Flows thing?"

My honest answer is: it depends 😆, but the decision is simpler than you might think.

A quick recap of both options

Power Apps embeds have been the standard answer for write-back in Power BI for years. You build a Canvas App, embed it via the Power Apps visual, and pass filter context from the report into the app. It works, it is flexible, and it can handle complex forms and logic. The cost is that you are maintaining a separate application, in a separate environment, with a separate deployment lifecycle, and you need Power Apps licenses on top of your Fabric capacity in most cases. For many use cases you want to implement Direct Query, so that severely limits the available (free) connectors.

Translytical Task Flows are new and Fabric-native. Using Fabric User Data Functions, you can wire up report interactions (button clicks, input slicers, filter context) directly to write operations on a Fabric data source. The user stays in the report. The data gets written back. No separate app, no separate license, no context switching.

Where Translytical Task Flows shine

The scenario I keep coming back to and see a lot at clients, is financial commentary. Think of a Finance department that reviews monthly results in a Power BI report. They want to add a written comment to a specific data point and have that comment stored together with its context: e.g. the reporting period, the sector, the department. So that next month, when they open the same report filtered to the same dimensions, the comment is right there.

This is a perfect Translytical Task Flows scenario. The filter context from the report passes directly into the User Data Function, the comment gets written to a Fabric SQL Database together with the dimension values, and the report reflects it immediately. Clean, simple, fully within Fabric.

Other scenarios where I think this is the right tool:

• Status updates on records directly in an operational report
• Discount or approval requests that trigger a Teams notification
• Flagging data quality issues from within the report without leaving the context

Where Power Apps still wins

I want to be clear: Power Apps is not going away, and for certain scenarios it remains the better choice.

The main one is UI complexity. Translytical Task Flows currently leans heavily on the input slicer for user input, which is a text field. If your write-back scenario involves multi-step forms, dropdown selections from a separate data source, conditional fields, or any kind of richer interaction model, Canvas Apps give you that flexibility and Translytical Task Flows do not, at least not yet.

The second one is non-Fabric targets. If you need to write back to Dataverse, SharePoint, an external API via a Power Platform connector, or any system outside of Fabric, Power Apps (and if necessary Power Automate) are still the right answer. Translytical Task Flows is built for Fabric-native write-back.

My current mental model is this: Translytical Task Flows for simple, Fabric-native write-back where the report context is the main input. Power Apps for anything that needs a richer UI or writes outside of Fabric.

A few things worth knowing before you start

PBIP and PBIR are fully supported. I initially assumed they were not, carried over from the preview days because that was still listed in the limitations. I checked with the PM directly and the docs have been updated: full support is there now at GA. If you were holding off because of ALM concerns, that blocker is gone.

Governance deserves a conversation upfront. User Data Functions live in Fabric, and someone needs to own them. Who writes them, who tests them, where do they sit in your deployment pipeline, and who gets called when something breaks? This is not a reason not to use the feature, but it is a conversation I would have with a client before the first function gets written, not after.

Power BI Embedded has limitations. Secure embed scenarios are supported, but check your specific scenario against the docs if you are building on top of Embedded.

Wrap-up

Translytical Task Flows is the write-back answer I have wanted to give clients for a long time. For the right scenarios it is leaner, more native, and frankly just less work than the Power Apps embed approach. But it is not a replacement for Power Apps across the board, and I think being honest about that boundary upfront saves a lot of pain later.

If you want to dig in:

• Translytical Task Flows overview
• Power BI March 2026 Feature Summary

Let me know: are you already using this with a client, or still evaluating?
And if you have hit the UI complexity ceiling with the input slicer, I am curious how you handled it.

Quick Tip: Get Ready for Changes in OneLake Operation Reporting

Check Your Capacity Metrics App

Just a quick heads-up for anyone using the Fabric Capacity Metrics app to monitor OneLake usage.

One of the upcoming features from the Fabric Roadmap I'm watching is OneLake Storage Lifecycle Management Policies. The idea is straightforward: rule-based policies that automatically move data between hot, cool, and cold storage tiers based on last access or modification time. So data you haven't touched in months stops costing you the same as data you query every day.

A recent message in the M365 Admin Center got me thinking (you need an Admin account to access this, or check out this Message Center Archive website instead):

Changes to OneLake operation reporting in Microsoft Fabric
Starting April 1, 2026, Microsoft is rolling out changes to how OneLake compute operations are reported in Fabric. This is tied to the (later) introduction of the mentioned OneLake storage tiers (hot, cool, and cold), and while billing rates are not changing, the way operations appear in your dashboards and reports is.

So what is changing?

The following changes are being applied:

• Operation names now include the storage tier. "OneLake Read via Proxy" becomes "OneLake Read (Hot)", for example.
• Proxy and Redirect operations are consolidated under a single operation name. No billing impact, but the names you're used to will disappear.
• Operations are now grouped by workspace in the Capacity Metrics app, under a new OneLake item. So plan for workspace-level reporting. If you rely on item-level operation details in the Capacity Metrics app, you'll have to use OneLake diagnostics going forward.

Units of measure and consumption rates stay the same, so no surprises on the bill.

A preview of how the reporting in the Metrics app will look like:

 

What should you do before April 1?

This change is rolling out in phases:

• Operation name changes start April 1
• Consolidation and Metrics app updates follow in the next weeks. Keep an eye on your tenant.

Steps you should take:

• Check if you have any custom reports, dashboards, or scripts that reference OneLake operation names, update those to match the new naming convention (think FUAM or others)
• If you rely on item-level operation detail in the Capacity Metrics app, set up OneLake diagnostics now so you don't lose visibility
• Share this with your helpdesk or anyone on your team who monitors capacity or cost analytics

You can find more details in the OneLake compute consumption documentation and track the rollout via the Microsoft 365 Message Center (MC1259829).

My Take On The Fabric Conference Updates

I am sure you have seen, there has been a lot of Fabric and Power BI news lately. Not surprisingly, Fabric Conference was also last week! 😀

I won't list all the updates here, you can read Arun's blog, or either of the Fabric or Power BI monthly feature summary blogs to go through the whole list:

• FabCon and SQLCon 2026: Unifying databases and Fabric on a single data platform
• Fabric March 2026 Feature Summary
• Power BI March 2026 Feature Summary

Instead, I will highlight what are the biggest game changers for me, and what you definitely should dive in deeper.

Platform

Database Hub (Early Access)

This is a new control plane for everything database: so Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL, MySQL and Fabric Database, offering estate-wide observability, delegated governance and Copilot-powered insights. I haven't seen or used it yet, but does this really take away the need to use the Azure Portal and / or SSMS?

Planning in Fabric IQ (New)

A new enterprise planning capability that brings financial and business planning directly into Fabric. So we're talking budgets, forecasts, scenarios and targets. To me it sounds like this is aimed at replacing disconnected planning tools (like Anaplan)? It's a co-operation / acquisition with Lumen, but as far as I got from the sessions and community notes, you don't pay Lumen directly but instead it just costs you CU's from the already present capacity.

OneLake + Databricks Unity Catalog (Preview)

They now added the capability to natively read from OneLake through Azure Databricks Unity Catalog. As I see more and more companies use Databricks combined with Fabric, as either bronze/silver or the whole data platform, I reckon this integration will have advantages for people using both platforms. It still looks like Microsoft is keeping their promise of keep developing an open platform.

Fabric Remote MCP (Preview)

If you haven't looked into MCP servers yet, I highly recommend you do. I also haven't dived deep into it, but I started doing some dabbling around with the Power BI modelling MCP server, for minor tweaks and measure creation, and that was already awesome.

Kurt Buhler and Eugene Meidinger have some good posts about the theory, inner workings and how to get started.

Power BI 

Translytical Taskflows (GA)

Translytical taskflows (TT) a.k.a. writeback for Power BI, although that doesn't paint the whole picture because it can do much more. It uses User Data Functions (Python notebooks) in Fabric to update data in a data store of you choice (e.g. Azure SQL, Fabric SQL Database, Lakehouse) from within certain elements in a Power BI report. Now that TT is GA I reckon much more companies will be able / are allowed to explore this. This will be a game-changer, you don't need seperate licenses for e.g. Power Apps or other 3rd party software that can do writeback.

Be aware though, because there are still some limitations, a.o. PBIR (Power BI enhanced report) and PBIP (Power BI Project) formats cannot be used together with TT.

Direct Lake on OneLake (GA)

Direct Lake now works better with OneLake security and it has more modeling features. The guidance is now clear: use Direct Lake on OneLake by default, unless you have a specific SQL endpiont security dependency. For me, import is still the default, but if you have specific requirements around data freshness or loading very large datasets into memory, you could have benefit by using Direct Lake.

TMDL View in web modeling (Preview)

Finally, we have TMDL view in the web! That makes the web modeling so much more complete, you can copy measures, tables or whole models over. Or adjust sources, parameters, anything! They also implemented a side-by-side diff view before applying changes.

Custom Totals in Tables / Matrices (Preview)

I know a few people that will be very pleased with this... :-) There's been a lot of complaining over the years that "my totals are off!". No, that's just the way DAX works... Well, now you can at least decide for yourself if you want to change it.

Modern Visual Defaults (Preview)

I wanted to call out this one, because I'm not sure if I'm actually a fan of this feature. The new default will be smoothed lines, which can sometimes give false data points in a graph. I'd have to check wether this will turn out good.

Developer

Git integration now has selective branching, where you can branch out for a specific feature and only pull items you need.

Furthermore, two new open-source projects have been added:

• Agent skills for Fabric: these are natural language plugins for GitHub Copilot terminal. This sounds like plugging into the Matrix and learning a new skill :) It also means you can use and share skills from and for the community.

• Fabric Jumpstart: these are reference architectures and single-click sample deployments. These look familiar to the earlier industry solutions, but now completely set up with data inside your own tenant.

Closing

With everything taken into account, Microsoft is betting hard on Fabric as the AI data operating sysem. I'm curious what the coming weeks and months will bring.

As I am typing this blog, I'm now actually in the plane to the MVP Summit in Redmond, Washington at the Microsoft HQ! Hopefully I can dive even deeper into a lot of these topics while I'm there!

Power BI Gebruikersdagen 2026

Today, it's that time of year again! The Dutch Power BI Gebruikersdagen are here :-)

Last year's keynote, photo credits by PBIG

Today is Master class Thursday, all day workshops, tomorrow is Deep Dive Friday, with 90 minute deep dive sessions, and Saturday is Community Saturday

This conference is a must see for me and my colleagues at Powerdobs. Although last year I had to miss it, because it coincided with our annual family ski-ing trip. I was really sad I had to miss out.


There are workshops on Thursday, those cover a whole day deep dive on one topic.
Then there are deep dive sessions on Friday, 90 minute (mostly technical) sessions on one topic.
And last, we have community Saturday, with sessions of 60 minutes, with also a lot of less technical  and more business focused sessions. This year, there are 11 (!) simultaneous sessions, so it will be very hard to pick one session per slot!

You can find the agenda with the full list of sessions here.


I'll be heading to the conference tomorrow. This year, I will present a 90-minute session on Friday, where I'll deep dive into the Direct Lake (pun intended).

It will be fun to see so many familiar faces again. And it's always good to meet new ones too.

Come say hello or ask a question in, before or after my session on Friday. I'll also be present the whole day on Saturday!

Fabric Workspace Settings Update: "License Type" Renamed to "Workspace Type"

Just a quick post because I noticed a change in the Fabric UI, specifically in the Workspace settings.

I am working on a demo for my Power BI Gebruikersdagen session, and wanted to switch a workspace to Fabric capacity. I noticed that the setting License type has changed, and is now called Workspace type.

You can see the new layout in the screenshot below.

The new setting called Workspace type

As you can see in the screenshot, there are now 2 groups of workspaces (= licenses):

• Power BI only workspace types
• Fabric and Power BI workspace types

The 1st category is for a Pro or PPU user license or an embedded SKU.

The 2nd type is for capacity licenes only, with an F or FT (trial) SKU, or an old P-SKU

There's no change to the licensing itself (at least as far as I know), it is just a slight rewording of the already available types of user and capacity licenses. The documentation on Workspace types is already updated to reflect these changes.

I've checked 3 different tenants, and in all of these I saw the same new setting being displayed. All these tenants are in the West-Europe region, and because it might not be available in all regions worldwide your tenant may still be showing the old License type.

I like the new categories and more clear distinction between Power BI and Fabric workspace types.

Let me know: Do you like this change?

Transitioning to the New Power BI Enhanced Report Format (PBIR) - What You Need to Know

Let me be clear: I really like and support the updates that Rui Romano has been pushing the last years!
In short, it brings:

• Better support for CI / CD and source control 
• Better integration for programmatic report updates, e.g. with LLM's
• More reliable merge outcomes with the PBIP and PBIR structures

With that being said, I do think some customers do not want to have preview features in production, so they will be cautious with the recent developments. Since the end of January, the PBIR format will be the default if you don't take action.
If you don't want to enable PBIR yet, or just want to know more about the transition, read on.

A little bit of background

Let's start with the basics, what is PBIP, TMDL and PBIR?

PBIP
PBIP turns Power BI into a real project instead of a single magic PBIX file. Files on disk, folders, source control that actually works. If you’ve ever tried to diff a PBIX and felt pain: PBIP is the fix.

TMDL
TMDL is the semantic model as text. Tables, measures, relationships: readable, reviewable, automatable. This is Microsoft finally saying “models are code”, not artifacts you click together and hope for the best.

PBIR
PBIR does the same, but for reports. Visuals, layout and interactions stored in a format that Git can understand. PBIX still exists, but the report inside it stops being a black box. That’s why PBIR becoming the default is a big deal.

So, PBIP is the structure, TMDL is the model, PBIR is the report.
Together, they move Power BI away from file-based BI and closer to proper software development, whether you asked for it or not. 😊
And to be clear, PBIX is still here and not moving away either, I will expand on that later.

Why This Matters Now

PBIR will become the default report format starting January 25th, 2026 in the Power BI Service, with Desktop adopting it in March 2026, but it will still be in preview.

This will affect developers using PBIP workflows, admins managing enterprise tenants, and teams relying on legacy formats.

Because a lot of clients don't want to use preview features, you can opt out during preview: let me explain how and why you might want to...

M365 Message center PBIR announcement

Legacy Format vs. Enhanced Report Format

The Legacy format is the older JSON-based metadata structure inside reports, which contains 1 big, unreadable JSON file for all things reports in your Power BI Desktop file, whether it's PBIX or PBIP.
This legacy format poses limitations on readability, CI/CD, automation, source-control and working with AI / LLM's. 

As I mentioned earlier, and Microsoft is also explicit about that, PBIX isn't going away. It will still be the primary developer format.

What will change is the metadata inside a PBIX file: from PBIR-Legacy to the new PBIR structure.

Official Timeline

Changes will hit the service first, and Power BI Desktop later.

Power BI Service, starting January 25:

• New reports in the service will default to PBIR
• Existing reports will auto-convert to PBIR when edited and saved in the service

Power BI Desktop, starting with the March 2026 release:

• Desktop switches to PBIR as the default for both PBIX and PBIP-files. Until then, PBIR must be explicitly enabled in the preview features

General Availability (GA) & Beyond:

• PBIR remains in Preview during the transition and becomes mandatory at GA (right now: expected in Q3 of 2026, check the roadmap for latest info)
• At GA, PBIR-Legacy will be removed and PBIR will be the only supported report format

What You Need To Do Today For Opting Out

In Power BI Desktop:

• Disable the PBIR preview features (under Options > Preview features).

In Power BI Service (Tenant Setting):

• Turn off Automatically convert and store reports using Power BI enhanced metadata format (PBIR).
• Important: this tenant setting already existed for quite a few weeks but only took effect in the end of January 2026

PBIR tenant setting to opt out before GA

What about rollback?

If a report is already converted to the new format, you can still go back, but you have to do it with a backup of your report. Backups are automatically created for you, both in Desktop and in the service, but they will only be available for a limited time window.

Desktop

In Desktop, a backup is automatically written to disk and kept for 30 days. Depending on which version you have, the location differs a little bit:

• Microsoft Store version:
  %USERPROFILE%\Microsoft\Power BI Desktop Store App\TempSaves\Backups
• Executable installer version:
  %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Power BI Desktop\TempSaves\Backups

Service

When a report is automatically converted in the service, a backup in legacy format is retained for 28 days. You can restore it from the workspace in the report settings.

For both the desktop and service reverted versions, it won't prompt again to upgrade for that specific file.

Wrap-Up & Call-to-Action

While the transition to PBIP and PBIR in general is a good thing, and I'm already using it for most of my projects, there might be some clients that rather do not want to, or just aren't allowed to use preview features in production.

If you are in the last group, I suggest you:

• Check the Power BI Desktop preview settings
• Check the Tenant settings in the Fabric Admin portal

Quick Tip: Analyze the Fabric Capacity Metrics App Easily

Just a quick tip for anyone using the Fabric Capacity Metrics App.

If you find yourself checking the Metrics app and see a spike in usage you might want to analyze that. How many times did you have to click to get exactly the column you needed? Or before you were able to click any column at all? 😁

You can of course filter on the dates, but sometimes that's not enough detail.

Let's say I want to analyze the spike around November 19th, but I can't click that one red bar that has the highest peak?

When you hover over the visual you can select Focus mode.

This brings up the visual on the entire screen, making it much easier to click on individual bars.

When you select the single bar you are looking for, and click Back to report on the top left you go back to the normal page view, but with that bar still selected.

You can then click Explore and go to the timepoint details.

Making sense in case of huge spikes

Sometimes you may hit a big spike in usage, either by high usage of the capacity, or because the capacity was paused.

In the above case I had a severe throttling issue, where the capacity would have been unavailable for multiple hours and the client decided to pause / unpause the capacity. This effectively takes all the future CU-usage and makes you pay it off at once, hence the enormous spike in usage on November 12th.

Note

Pausing a capacity will almost always increase your Azure bill, next to the Fabric capacities you already have.

The downside is that this immediately renders this visual useless, because now you can't see anything other than that 65000% spike anymore.. 😁

If you want to make this visual meaningful again, you can filter out the date with the very high %, in the filter pane on Date.

Change the selection to Basic filtering and select only the dates without the spike!

Power BI - Requirements to Use Analyze in Excel

I think I now got this question 4 times in the last months, so I thought I'd write it down so I can reference it later, and point people to it 😄

What are the requirements so (a group of) colleagues can start using Analyze in Excel?

Good question, let me break it down. 
In general, I think it's also better to use Analyze in Excel than Export to Excel!
Reza Rad also wrote about why that's important earlier.

Prerequisites to use Analyze in Excel

• Power BI license
  You either need a Power BI Pro or PPU license, or the semantic model you connect to must be in a workspace backed by a Power BI Premium / Fabric F-capacity, this needs to be an F64 or higher SKU. Although I have seen some instances where it might have (temporarily) worked with a lower F-SKU, this is not supported/allowed (see Power BI licensing).
• Tenant Setting
  Your Power BI / Fabric Administrator needs to enable the Tenant setting in the Admin Portal: "Users can work with Power BI semantic models in Excel using a live connection". You can learn more about that setting on the admin portal documentation.
  
• Semantic Model permissions
  The user needs at least build permissions on the semantic model, or at least the Contributor role in the workspace. Ideally you put people in an Entra ID group and give that the appropriate permissions.
• Excel
  You obviously need Excel Desktop or Excel for the web installed for it to work. You might have to install some updates for it to work.

A few things to be aware of:

• Analyze in Excel creates a dynamic, live connection to the Power BI dataset, so any changes to the dataset will be reflected when the Excel report is refreshed

• Free users can analyze data from Premium workspaces without needing a Pro license, provided they have the appropriate role (at least build permissions or Contributor role) assigned in that Premium workspace

• You'll need to use measures in the PivotTable's values area, as you can't directly drag numeric columns like 'cost' into that area. It's anyway better to create explicit instead of implicit measures

Fabric Quality of Life Update: No More Default Semantic Models!

Another quick post, because today is an important day for everyone working with Fabric and Power BI!

Last month, Microsoft announced they are Sunsetting Default Semantic Models: Yaay! 😀
Today marks that day: No more automatic child semantic models!

The info message also states only a SQL endpoint is created

So now whenever you create a warehouse, lakehouse, SQL database, or mirrored database, you only will get that item, and the SQL analytics endpoint connected to it.

No more default semantic models!

This means from now on you always have to manage the semantic model yourself, whenever you create one of the above items.

What about my existing default semantic models?

To be clear: existing (default) semantic models are not affected (yet!). But by the end of December (2025) they will be decoupled from their connected item, and you will have to manage that model manually.

Conclusion

Now that Fabric is getting more widely used, the demand for stronger governance and greater control over semantic models was growing. This change takes away the auto/generated models and gives you more control in the creation of your semantic models.

To read more about this:

• Take a look at the documentation of semantic models
• Or at the blog post announcing the deprecation

There's more information in those links about the exact changes and menu-items going away, the timeline and future updates/blog posts.

Changes to Fabric Tenant Settings for API's

If you are a Fabric Administrator, either for your own tenant / company or for customers, you might get the weekly emails from Microsoft 365 Message center. I've mentioned this briefly in an earlier post about Changes to default values for a tenant setting for SQL Database.

I advice you to at least have a look through that weekly email and check for any Fabric or Power BI updates. An example update you can get is like the below. This screenshot is actually from the Message Center itself, not from the email.

The problem with the M365 Message Center is that only people with privileged roles can access it. And not all updates shown there are communicated in other ways by Microsoft. Sometimes they write a blog post, like this one: Cognitive services and Azure ML will be fully retired, sometimes there's a specific info message in Fabric, or there might be a new tag in the tenant settings, but more often you don't see any other communications around the topic.

So if you are not a Fabric Admin, you probably haven't seen the message I want to inform you about today, so that's why I'm writing this post!

Call To Action

TL;DR

Two new admin toggles are live in the Fabric Tenant Settings, under Developer settings. Check your Tenant Settings and see how they relate to your policies and governance!

Action Required on API Access Setting Split

Microsoft Fabric is changing how service principal access to public APIs is controlled. The existing all-or-nothing tenant setting was split into two separate settings — giving us admins more granular control, but also introducing a change you might need to act on after August 1, 2025.

The previous setting

What Has Changed?

From mid-May to early June 2025, the previous admin setting for public API access via service principals was replaced with:

1. Service principals can create workspaces, connections, and deployment pipelines
   → Governs “global” APIs not tied to specific Fabric permissions (e.g., workspace creation).
   → Disabled by default.

2. Service principals can call Fabric public APIs
   → Governs APIs protected by the Fabric permission model (CRUD access to workspaces, folders, etc).
   → Enabled by default.

The new settings

Why This Matters

This split is a long-needed improvement: previously, disabling API access to protect core resources also blocked developers from using safe, permission-based APIs.

Now, you can lock down the high-risk parts (like workspace creation) without blocking everything else.

But: Microsoft may have enabled the second setting (permission-based API access) by default in your tenant unless you opted out.

Why should I care? You might have service principals running scripts to create workspaces, deploy certain items or manage workspace objects for example.

What You Should Do Now

• Check your Fabric admin portal for the two new settings under Developer Settings

• Before August 1, 2025, you could've shown a checkbox labeled "Accept Microsoft’s change to enable...", and you want to keep permission-based API access disabled, uncheck the box and hit Apply

• Check the values of both settings

Timeline Recap

• May–June 2025: Settings split rolls out

• July 31, 2025: Last day to opt out of automatic enablement

• August 1, 2025: Microsoft finalizes the transition

Conclusion

In case you are running a monitoring solution that keeps a history of Tenant Settings, for example FUAM, you can check the Tenant Settings history and see when the change became active in your tenant. If you don't have such a monitoring solution, I highly recommend checking FUAM out. You can get started with setup and deployment of the solution with a few hours of work.

I spotted this setting shift on telemetry around June 1 in my tenant:

There were some changes in how tenant settings can control access for Service Principals to API's. Make sure to check your settings and adjust them accordingly.

If you want to read more info on the exact workings of the tenant settings, have a look at the Tenant Settings documentation.

Did you already notice these changes and take action?

Let me know in the comments.

My session at Fabric Week by ESPC - Q&A

On Tuesday, May 27th, I had the honor of presenting a session for the Fabric Week at ESPC:

A Day In The Life Of A(n Accidental) Fabric Administrator.

The session was recorded and is already available on YouTube, but unfortunately we ran out of time before I could answer all the questions during the session.

Thanks to ESPC and Seán Colleran I got hold of all the questions asked during the session, and I will provide answers in this blog post where I can.

Q&A

Without further ado, let's go to the questions:

1. How do you enable Fabric mirroring from the tenant settings?
   You don't have to enable mirroring specifically, but you do need to enable the creation of Fabric items in general: Enable Microsoft Fabric for your organization. You also need a workspace with an active Fabric capacity (trial or any F-SKU).

2. Can we mirror PostgreSQL with that option?
   Yes, you can mirror PostgreSQL, but only Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server. Keep in mind that currently mirroring doesn't support Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server behind an Azure Virtual Network or private networking.

3. As a Fabric admin, can I scale Fabric Capacity from F64 to F128, for example?
   For scaling only, being a Capacity admin should be enough, as explained in scale capacity.
   

4. What’s the best way to implement stop/start on Fabric Capacity?
   You might be able to, depending on the rights you have in the Azure Portal.
   To be specific, you need to have at least contributor rights on the Azure subscription. Specific permissions (to create a capacity) for an RBAC role are explained here.
   You can use the Fabric Capacities REST API's to Pause/Resume the capacity. You can call these API's with PowerShell, but also with Azure Data Factory, a Logic App, or from within a Fabric notebook. For the latter, you need a different capacity then the one you want to pause/resume though.

5. I want to manage capacity units. How can we manage the autoscaling function?
   If you mean Autoscale Billing for Spark, that is currently in preview and only controls the spark compute. There is no other option for autoscaling the SKU-size in Fabric. 

6. We have multiple customers on one tenant. Each wants to monitor their own Fabric capacity. What’s the best practice for setting up the Capacity Metrics App?
   In the Capacity Metrics workspace, you can create multiple copies of the report and put a report filter on a specific capacity. Then give a user specific permissions to only view that report.

7. Is there a way to reset tenant settings to “default” or Microsoft-recommended settings?
   Unfortunately not. You can check the documentation for the Tenant settings index, some settings mention a default value.
   If you are able to set up a totally new (test) tenant in Azure you could check the default values for the Tenant settings in that tenant.

8. On the permissions level, how do you differentiate between non-production and production environments?
   Usually this is done by using workspaces for dev-test-prod. On a workspace level you can easily manage permissions. Within Fabric you can use Deployment Pipelines to transfer items between the dev-test-prod stages.

9. I’m a user. Our new admin has set up Fabric Capacity (F2 pay-as-you-go). I have permission to create workspaces, but the Fabric Capacity option is greyed out.
   To be able to assign workspaces to a capacity you need at least Contributor permissions. The admin of a capacity can assign users on the Capacity settings page in the Admin portal:
   

   

10. Who can we scale up Spark clusters? How can we ensure only admins can do this?
    So go from a small Spark pool to a medium Spark pool.
    A workspace Admin can change the settings for Spark workloads in the workspace settings:
    

    
    
    They can adjust the current pools and create new ones. You can't limit it further, so every workspace Admin can do this.
    If you uncheck the last option, Members or lower can't change the settings on a session-level.

11. What’s the best way to implement a stop/start schedule for Fabric — e.g., only running during the day?
    Please see question 4.

12. For notification activities in a pipeline: I want to use Teams notifications. Do I need an Office license or a specific Teams license?
    To actually set up a working Teams activity, you need a Teams license, and a channel or chat to post it to. I was able to add the activity without a Teams license, but I can't select a channel to post to in that way.

13. Can a workspace admin restrict a tenant admin from accessing a specific workspace?
    No. A tenant (Fabric) admin can always go to the Admin portal and gain access to any workspace in the tenant.

14. What is the best alert mechanism? As a Fabric Admin, I want to know about overloads as soon as possible.
    There are a few options, I'll let you decide on the best one to use.
    On the Capacity settings page you can set up a notification for X% capacity usage.
    

    

    Somewhat similar, but more customizable, you can also set up an alert on the Capacity Metrics app with Activator (Real-Time Intelligence) and send a Teams or Outlook message.
    

    
    
    Not an alert mechanism per se, but on the capacity settings page, you can also set up Surge Protection, which lets you limit the compute consumed by background jobs. This way you can make sure the capacity doesn't overrun from background jobs.
    
    
    

15. Is there a way to kill a process in interactive operations?
    For most interactive operations you can't, like DAX or XMLA queries. Lakehouse or Warehouse queries can be stopped with the KILL command used in T-SQL.

16. If I pause a capacity with over-usage, will I see in advance how much I'll have to pay?
    No, not out-of-the-box. You could calculate the amount of overage, CU's and thus price, mainly from the Capacity Metrics app. But that's a manual calculation you'd have to do upfront.

17. Is there a way to connect that monitoring to a running Grafana?
    Apparently you can connect a Managed Grafana instance to a KQL database (eventhouse) in Fabric. It's explained in this post.

18. Do you need to be paying for Purview to use the Fabric Purview Hub reports?
    The Purview Hub reports are included as part of the Admin Monitoring workspace, so you don't need to pay extra or for a Purview license.

19. Is there a way to monitor the count of accesses per user on a report (like in PBI Report Server ExecutionLog3)?
    You can get this data from the default Usage Metrics Report, generated when clicking the below option on a report.
    

    
    
    You can also get all activity data (from all reports) out of the Activity Log, for example with the REST API - Get Activity Events. Keep in mind though, this has a data retention period of 30 days.
    
    

20. I understood the admin monitoring semantic models were locked — how did you create a custom version?
    You can indeed not edit the model itself, but as a Fabric Admin you do have Member access to the Admin Monitoring workspace, and thus Build permissions. So if you connect to the semantic model from Power BI Desktop, you can extend it (create a local model) with your own data. You would also be able to do this with Viewer access and build permissions.

21. Pro vs. Premium per-user license: What are the three most important reasons to choose Premium per-user over Pro on a Fabric capacity?
    It depends? 😉 In most cases, I would say if you already have Fabric, PPU is not necessary anymore. But of course, there are edge cases where it might benefit to have a PPU, I can think of one: Model size limits in low F-SKUs are pretty low (3 GB), in PPU it's 100 GB
    

22. Have you seen examples where the 30-day limit for admin monitoring has been extended by updating a custom Lakehouse and running reporting off that?
    Yes, you can export the Admin monitoring data to a Lakehouse. The solution I called out in my presentation is FUAM, which doesn't specifically extract the data from the Admin monitoring workspace, but it gets similar data from the rest of the tenant.

23. If I am not a Fabric admin, how can I get access to admin monitoring?
    By default, only users with the Fabric admin role (or higher) will have access. But the Fabric admin can also give other people (Viewer) access to the workspace.

24. Is there an API to extract user views on each Power BI report page?
    Yes, the Activity Events API, see question 19.

25. The 30 days... is that the same as the Dashboard Usage Metrics?
    Yes, right now, the retention is similar in all the Power metrics reports, except for the Capacity Metrics, which holds 14 days of data.

There's No Free Lunch - (Billing of) Preview Features in Fabric

Another post on my favorite topic: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

I decided to leave "Governance & Administration" out of the titles of my blog posts from now on.
The titles were getting a bit lengthy, just because I wanted to include the focus on Governance & Administration. I am already using labels which you can use for that: Governance, Administration, etc..

Today, let's talk about preview features in Fabric!

Preview features

First of all, when using Preview features in Fabric, you should be aware of the small print.

Next, we all know, there's no such thing as a free lunch, right?

Because: preview does not mean free! Let me explain.

Two of those preview features - SQL Database and Workspace Monitoring - have recently moved to a charging model as Fabric develops further. It's essential to understand these adjustments if you want to maximize your resources, govern your capacity and efficiently control expenses.

Fabric SQL Database

I wrote about it earlier when they were about to change the tenant setting for SQL Database: you should be aware that billing for SQL Database already started.

Compute and data storage for SQL databases are now charged according to your Fabric capacity beginning of February 1, 2025. The start date of backup billing is April 1, 2025. You can only pay for the resources you use because compute charges only apply when you are actively using the service. Automatic backups and storage are priced individually each month. Check Microsoft Learn for more details on billing and utilization reporting.

If you check the doc's on the usage of SQL Database you can see that:

1 Fabric capacity unit corresponds to 0.383 Database vCores, or, 1 Database vCore corresponds to 2.611 Fabric capacity unit.

For example, a Fabric capacity SKU F64 has 64 capacity units, which is equivalent to 24.512 SQL database vCores.

Compute is billed by the minute, but the database is also kept alive for 15 minutes afterwards. So if you use it for 4 minutes, you are actually billed for 19 minutes!
Storage will be billed per hour, regardless of usage.

Workspace Monitoring

Workspace Monitoring gathers and arranges logs and metrics from different Fabric components by building an Eventhouse database inside your workspace, providing insightful data about workspace performance and usage.
You can use this tool to optimize queries, minimize data downtime, investigate mistakes, and fix performance concerns.

As of February 2025, Workspace Monitoring billing has begun. Make sure you have a Power BI Premium or Fabric capacity and that the required tenant settings are set up in order to enable monitoring in your workspace. Check Microsoft Learn for a detailed tutorial on how to enable and use Workspace Monitoring.

Check your usage after this changeover

It is crucial to examine your present and anticipated consumption in order to foresee any expenses now that invoicing for these functions has been activated. To keep an eye on capacity utilization across all workloads and make sure it fits your organization's demands and budget, use the Fabric Capacity Metrics app. 

See Fabric capacity billing guidelines for a more thorough explanation of how these modifications affect your Azure bill.

Are you using these preview features in your tenant?

And did you know they are already billed?

Let me know in the comments!

Microsoft Fabric Documentation (for Admins)

Maybe this topic is not the most sexiest of them all, but it certainly has the same (or maybe even more) amount of value for YOU!
And.. another post on my favorite topic: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

Earlier I wrote about the default domain settings, changes to the default tenant setting value for SQL database and I also covered the (rights of the) Fabric Adminsitrator role. Today I want to talk about a more meta-topic: existing documentation on Microsoft Learn, and of course specifically for Admins.

Microsoft Fabric documentation

By this point, I assume you've read this far (and perhaps a few other posts as well), I guess you've heard of Microsoft Learn. 😁 

If not, go there now: Microsoft Fabric documentation!

It is full of so much good content, to name a few:

• Overview 
• What is Fabric: The B.A.S.I.C.S.
• Security in Fabric: You might not be aware, but there's so many things you can do to tweak and adjust security for your organization!
• Concepts 
• Choose a Fabric data store: Choose between a Lakehouse, Warehouse, Eventhouse, or SQL Database
• Copilot in Fabric: In what workloads can you use Copilot and what are the prereqs?
• Capacity and license types: This explains concepts like a tenant, capacity, workspace, SKU's, Power BI licenses, etc.
• Tutorials
• Use taskflows to build solutions: I'm curious, who really uses these in their environment?
• End-to-end tutorials: Those tutorials where the corner-stone of getting started with Fabric after it was announced. They still provide enourmous value, although sometimes the steps can be very basic.

And there's so much more:

Ok, I know... Sometimes the documentation is, let's say, a bit behind the latest features in Fabric, right?

It may be outdated, there might be typo's, it might even be wrong in some points.

Instead of (only) complaining, you should do something about it! 😏

Did you know you can edit those pages (make sure you're logged in to your MS Learn account):

After clicking that pencil on a doc page, you end up at GitHub where you can make changes to the document. You do need a GitHub account, know how to fork the repo and create a Pull Request when you're done (if you don't know how to, read this tutorial on GitHub 101).

Microsoft Fabric documentation for admins

Now on to my favorite part: the Admin stuff! 😁

Go to Microsoft Fabric documentation for admins to learn all about admin settings, tools, the admin portal, admin roles, and monitoring and management to name a few.

What is the admin monitoring workspace

The admin monitoring workspace is a specialized environment designed for Fabric administrators to monitor and manage workloads, usage, and governance within their tenant. Using the resources available within the workspace, admins can perform tasks such as security audits, performance monitoring, capacity management, and more.

It recently got a revamp on the design side and now looks way better.

The information contained in the report is on a fairly basic level, but you can still get some good insights out of it.

Next to that, you can also connect to the semantic model and extend it.

Closing

As you see there is a lot of information available on Microsoft Learn.`

Do you think the documentation on Microsoft Learn is valuable? Have you used it?

Does it need improvement? If yes, on what points?

Let me know in the comments!

Changes to the Default Tenant Setting value for SQL Database

Another post on my favorite topic: Governance and Administration!

With all the Fabric announcements in the last months, some of the Admin announcements might have slipped through. As you might know, the Admin part of Fabric is dear to my heart. I've posted about it earlier here, here, here, and here, to name a few 😀.

So in the next weeks I am going to highlight a few things with short, informative posts.

I decided to leave "Governance & Administration" out of the titles of my blog posts from now on.
The titles were getting a bit lengthy, just because I wanted to include the focus on Governance & Administration. I am already using labels which you can use for that: Governance, Administration, etc..

UPDATE 2025-03-12:

Microsoft released an update on the rollout of the changes to this setting. The actual enablement is postponed for 20 days to March 28. The timelines mentioned in the blog below are now:

• February 28, 2025 - Checkbox notification rolled out globally.
• March 8, 2025 -  Infobox will display this as the enablement date.
• March 28, 2025 - Actual enablement date for tenants that take no action.

Extending flexibility: default checkbox changes on tenant settings for SQL database in Fabric

Microsoft 365 Message Center

In case you have access to the M365 Admin Center, or more specific the M365 Message Center, you might have seen this message. I reckon not many people did.. That's why I'm blogging about it here 😁

I'm specifically talking about this message in the Message Center, being a major update and with admin impact: 

Communications on default checkbox changes on tenant settings and billing start for SQL database in Fabric.

Changes to SQL Database Tenant Setting

Recently, there's been a change to the tenant setting for SQL Database, but only in case you haven't changed the setting before.. 😉

Below is the setting in my own tenant, where the setting is still disabled, which was and still is the default option (hint: this is about to change!).

So if I do nothing, then after March 8, the default value will change to ON, or Enabled for the entire organization.

If I decide to opt out before March 8, so if I uncheck the checkbox Accept Microsoft's default selection (Off for the entire organization), this tenant setting will stay disabled, also after March 8.

To be clear, as I mentioned, you only see this message if you haven't changed the default setting (off).

In the Powerdobs tenant we already enabled SQL Database, so I only see the below:

M365 Message Center for Non-Admins

In case you don't have access to the Message Center, I found another site, called the Microsoft 365 Message Center Archive, where all those messages are replicated, set up by Merill Fernando, Principal Product Manager for Microsoft Entra.

Direct link to the message: https://mc.merill.net/message/MC996579.

I have been searching for a (regular) blog post on this topic, but I haven't seen anything:
Multiple other blog posts were written on the Fabric blog, but none of them explicitly mentioned any of this:

• Feb 12: Govern your data in SQL database in Microsoft Fabric with protection policies in Microsoft Purview
  
• Feb 19: Enhancing SQL database in Fabric: share your feedback and shape the future
  
• Feb 26: Why SQL database in Fabric is the best choice for low-code/no-code Developers
• There's a little link to Billing and utilization reporting for SQL database hidden in this blog post, which explains billing started at February 1st, but no mention of the tenant setting

Billing for SQL Database (preview)

Last thing I want to explicitly call out in accordance with the changed tenant setting:

While SQL Database in Fabric is still in preview, billing already started at February 1. Furthermore, billing for backup starts after April 1.

So when the setting is changed to ON, and you don't run a trial, you can start seeing SQLDbNative on your Capacity Metrics App as explained here. 😉