Every Microsoft Fabric Feature, Explained

Hot, cool, and cold tiers matching Azure Storage, plus lifecycle rules that move files by creation, modification, or last-access time, set per workspace default or per file.

Role-based access control defined once on the data and enforced consistently across Spark, the SQL analytics endpoint, and Direct Lake over OneLake, with the union of roles resolved for each user.

Turns structured files behind a shortcut into managed Delta tables that Fabric Spark keeps in sync by polling every two minutes, with no pipeline to build; Excel input is still in preview.

A Windows client that mounts every workspace you can access as a folder tree, syncing placeholders on demand the way OneDrive does, with a tenant setting to switch it off.

Metadata virtualization that generates a virtual Delta log for Iceberg tables and virtual Iceberg metadata for Delta tables, so both formats are readable by every Fabric engine and by external Iceberg readers.

Workspace-level streaming of data-access events as JSON into a lakehouse you choose, with optional immutable retention for compliance and a documented schema you can turn into Delta tables.

The tenant-wide Explore, Govern, and Secure surface for Fabric items, also embedded in Teams, Excel, and Copilot Studio, with a search REST API for programmatic discovery.

Cross-tenant, in-place sharing that creates a read-only shortcut in the consumer's lakehouse pointing back at the source, so changes show immediately and revoking the share cuts access.

The single logical data lake behind every Fabric workload, built on ADLS Gen2 and storing tables as Delta or Iceberg, so one copy of data serves Spark, T-SQL, KQL, and Power BI without duplication.

Pointers that make external or cross-workspace data appear as local folders and tables, with schema kept in sync automatically and an optional cache for cross-cloud reads.

The Mapping Data Flow authoring canvas and Spark execution engine embedded in Dataflow Gen2, with a built-in migration experience from Azure Data Factory and Synapse.

A managed dbt Core runtime that builds, tests, and documents SQL models against Fabric Data Warehouse and other supported targets, enabled per tenant from the admin portal.

Natural-language authoring for Dataflow Gen2 and pipelines, including pipeline generation, expression building, and error explanation, gated by a tenant setting and a paid F2 or P1 capacity.

Mounts an existing factory as a native Fabric item for side-by-side operation, paired with an assessment-first upgrade experience (in preview since March 2026) that grades each pipeline Ready, Needs review, Coming soon, or Not compatible.

A hosted Airflow (2.10.5, Python 3.12) with Git sync, autoscale, high availability, and deferrable operators, running as a Fabric item alongside pipelines.

A guided, serverless data-movement item with watermark and CDC incremental modes, append, overwrite, merge, and SCD Type 2 writes, audit columns, and multiple schedules; CDC replication and auto-partitioning inside it are still in preview.

The low-code orchestration engine, carrying the Copy activity plus notebook, Spark, stored procedure, dataflow, Teams, and email activities, with the same SLA as Azure Data Factory.

Low-code ETL built on Power Query that loads to lakehouse, warehouse, KQL, SQL database, ADLS Gen2, Snowflake, PostgreSQL, and more; since April 2026 every new Gen2 dataflow is created with CI/CD and Git support.

The connector library shared by pipelines, Copy job, and Dataflow Gen2, reached through direct cloud connections, the on-premises data gateway, or the virtual network data gateway.

The current-generation Spark runtime, generally available but opt-in per workspace or environment, with the native execution engine included and Delta 4.x-only features marked experimental.

Declarative, dependency-aware Delta tables that Fabric refreshes incrementally when source tables have change data feed enabled, with constraints, lineage, and run analytics built in; PySpark authoring is still in preview.

Serverless Python 3.11 functions with PyPI packages, managed connections to Fabric data sources, and an auto-generated REST endpoint with Entra authentication.

An opt-in, per-capacity model (announced as Autoscale Billing for Spark) that moves Spark jobs onto separately billed serverless compute under a CU ceiling you set, with interactive jobs throttled and batch jobs queued at the limit.

A vectorized C++ engine built on Velox and Gluten that offloads supported operators from JVM Spark with no code changes, enabled per environment, notebook, or job, and falling back automatically when an operator is unsupported.

A workspace item bundling runtime version, compute sizing, libraries (Quick or Full publish mode), and resource files that notebooks and Spark job definitions attach to, shareable across workspaces on the same capacity.

A generated GraphQL schema, resolvers, and endpoint over Fabric data sources, with relationships, stored procedures, an in-portal editor, and CI/CD support (GA February 2026).

Delta tables plus files in one item, with automatic table discovery, a read-only SQL analytics endpoint generated for free, and schema support (GA since December 2025) for organizing tables.

The primary code item for engineering and data science, with public APIs for CI/CD (GA March 2026), Python-only notebooks that skip Spark entirely (GA September 2025), and a security context that follows whoever last edited the pipeline or schedule.

A code item that submits a main definition file plus libraries and arguments to the Spark cluster against a default lakehouse, runnable from pipelines with a service principal or workspace identity.

Starter pools give a session in 5 to 10 seconds from prewarmed medium nodes on a best-effort basis; custom pools set node size (4 to 64 vCores per node), autoscale bounds, dynamic executor allocation, and session expiry, sized against two Spark vCores per capacity unit with a 3x burst; custom live pools (preview, May 2026) keep a hydrated cluster warm on a schedule for roughly five second starts.

A guided experience that migrates tables, views, procedures, and security objects from a DACPAC or a direct source connection (direct connection GA June 2026), prioritizes failed scripts by dependency, and hands data movement to Copy job.

System restore points every eight hours plus user-defined ones with configurable retention (1 to 120 days), read-only snapshots you can roll forward (GA November 2025), and dropped-warehouse recovery from the recycle bin (GA July 2026).

Schema-aware T-SQL generation and repair in a chat pane, completions, and ribbon quick actions, gated by the tenant Copilot setting and a paid capacity.

An enterprise-scale relational warehouse on Delta storage with separated compute and storage, cross-database queries, COPY INTO and CTAS loading, autonomous workload management, and IDENTITY columns (GA August 2026).

The auto-provisioned, read-only T-SQL surface over Delta tables, shared by lakehouses, SQL databases, and mirrored databases, where OneLake security rules are enforced for SQL clients.

The in-portal editor for warehouses, SQL analytics endpoints, and mirrored databases, with IntelliSense, templates, autosave, cross-warehouse queries, and a September 2026 GA wave adding a faster grid, bulk query management, and .sql import and export.

KQL-backed dashboards with live refresh, Copilot-generated tiles and queries, conditional formatting, Git integration, and safe sharing that does not expose the underlying data.

Named, schema-governed events published from Activator, Eventstream, notebooks, or user data functions into Real-Time hub, where consumers (Activator alerts, functions, notebooks, pipelines, Power Automate) subscribe without touching the publisher; every published event is also written to a KQL table in an eventhouse by default for history and dashboards, and the Schema Registry in Real-Time hub holds the contract.

A first-class map item that layers Eventhouse KQL results and lakehouse spatial data with points, lines, polygons, and imagery, refreshing on an interval and billed as ordinary capacity consumption.

A low-code ontology and mapping experience for physical environments, stored in OneLake, with an explorer, time-series views, public APIs, and hooks into Power BI, Real-Time Dashboard, data agents, and Activator.

The automatically provisioned home for data in motion, with connectors for Event Hubs, IoT Hub, Service Bus, six database CDC sources, Kafka variants, Kinesis, Pub/Sub, and Fabric capacity, workspace, OneLake, and job events.

A no-code detection engine that evaluates stateless and stateful rules per business object, previews how often a rule would have fired, and only bills while rules are running; rules can also be authored inside Eventstream (GA August 2026).

No-code stream collection and processing with a Kafka-compatible endpoint, a SQL operator (GA April 2026), and DeltaFlow (preview since March 2026), which turns raw CDC events into analytics-ready, schema-tracked streams.

A container of KQL databases that indexes data by arrival time for sub-second queries over billions of events, exposes one logical copy to OneLake, and now includes native anomaly detection (preview since September 2025) and a Capacity Planner for always-on baselines.

FLAML-based automated model selection and hyperparameter tuning with Spark-parallel trials, constraint and metric configuration, Plotly visualizations, and a low-code experience that reached GA in March 2026.

The SemPy library and Spark native connector that read semantic models into a FabricDataFrame carrying measures and metadata, with validation tools for relationships and functional dependencies.

Nine LLM-powered functions callable from pandas, PySpark, T-SQL, and Dataflow Gen2 with high concurrency and row-level isolation, defaulting to a built-in model and configurable to Azure OpenAI or Foundry models; multimodal input is in preview.

A visual data-prep surface launched from any notebook cell, with a searchable operation library, PROSE-powered suggestions, Copilot prompts, and pandas-to-PySpark translation of the applied steps.

Built-in MLflow experiments and runs with visual comparison, tagging, MLflow 3 logged models and GenAI traces, cross-workspace logging (GA April 2026), and a Save as ML model path into the registry.

The Azure SQL Database engine as a SaaS Fabric item, with automatic tuning, near-real-time replication to OneLake, Git integration, SqlPackage portability, a GraphQL API in one click, and its own Copilot (GA November 2025).

The Azure Cosmos DB for NoSQL engine with autonomous defaults, Entra-only identity, and automatic Delta mirroring into OneLake so notebooks, Power BI, and cross-database queries see the same documents.

Mirrors only the catalog structure and reaches the data through shortcuts, with an auto-generated SQL analytics endpoint and Direct Lake support; Dremio catalogs, AWS Glue, and Google Lakehouse Runtime Catalog use the same pattern in preview.

A landing-zone contract in OneLake where any writer drops inserts, updates, and deletes per the open mirroring format, and the replication engine turns them into a mirrored database with a SQL analytics endpoint.

Managed, near-real-time replication of whole databases or selected tables into Delta tables with free replication compute and a storage allowance tied to capacity size; SQL Server 2025, PostgreSQL, and Cosmos DB reached GA in November 2025, Oracle and SAP in March 2026, BigQuery in August 2026.

Apps as first-class Fabric items, multiple per workspace, with audiences as child items, automatic access propagation to included items and their semantic models, and Teams and PowerPoint support.

A storage mode that pages Delta columns straight into VertiPaq memory with metadata-only refreshes, reading any Fabric Delta source without DirectQuery fallback; calculated columns and tables on it are still in preview.

Data function buttons that pass the current filter context to a user data function, which writes back or triggers downstream systems, with in-report alerts built on the same pattern.

The report Copilot pane (generally available) plus preview surfaces for standalone chat across all your items, app-scoped answers with author-verified responses, and model-authoring help, all billed as capacity consumption.

The tabular model at the center of Fabric BI, created explicitly since September 2025 (default models are no longer auto-generated) and editable on the web (GA September 2025), with Direct Lake as the storage mode for new models on lakehouses and warehouses.

Direct Lake over a single lakehouse or warehouse: reads its Delta tables, uses its SQL analytics endpoint for table and view discovery and permission checks, and falls back to DirectQuery when it cannot read the Delta files directly (SQL views, SQL-based granular access control). The model's Direct Lake behavior property decides whether that fallback happens or the query fails.

Save as PBIP to get folder-per-item text definitions with public JSON schemas; TMDL view in Desktop reached GA in September 2025 and the enhanced report format (PBIR) became the default in January 2026 while the project format itself stays in preview.

An enterprise planning suite inside Fabric IQ with planning sheets, PowerTable sheets for dimensional models, Intelligence sheets for variance analysis, and Infobridge for integration, writing results back to a SQL database in Fabric.

A scale-out labeled property graph over OneLake tables with ISO GQL and natural-language-to-GQL querying, built-in algorithms, auto-shutdown when idle, and data agent support for graph reasoning (preview).

Playbook-driven agents with their own Microsoft Entra Agent ID, running delegated as their creator, evaluating state and transition rules every five minutes, and drafting rules conversationally through Copilot.

The open-source local Model Context Protocol server, installable as a VS Code extension or via npx, that grounds GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or any MCP host in Fabric's APIs and your items; a family of remote preview servers covers the individual workloads.

Configurable conversational analytics that translates questions to SQL, DAX, KQL, or Graph queries under the caller's permissions and Purview policies, publishable to Microsoft 365 Copilot (GA June 2026), Copilot Studio (GA August 2026), Foundry, and Teams, with Git and deployment-pipeline support.

Microsoft's enterprise intelligence layer for business data, sitting alongside Work IQ and Foundry IQ, with three layers: unified data in OneLake, curated KPIs in semantic models, and operational context in ontologies.

Entity types, properties, relationships, rules, and data bindings that compile into a queryable instance graph with natural-language querying (NL2Ontology); source changes require a manual refresh in the current preview.

Per-workload assistants on a shared Azure OpenAI architecture, on by default for paid capacities, billed as background capacity consumption, and gated by cross-geo tenant settings outside the US and EU data boundary.

Soft delete on by default with a three-day retention, configurable to 90 days by tenant admins, alongside collaborative-workspace retention of 7 to 90 days.

Tenant-level and workspace-level private links (workspace level GA October 2025), managed virtual networks and private endpoints for Data Engineering, trusted workspace access, conditional access, and service tags.

Deny-by-default egress per workspace with allow lists via managed private endpoints or data connection rules, covering Spark, Data Factory, Warehouse, Real-Time Intelligence, mirroring, Fabric IQ agents, and OneLake, plus a tenant admin API to audit every policy.

Workspace-level customer-managed keys that wrap the Microsoft encryption key, extended to SQL database in Fabric (GA March 2026) and manageable through APIs (GA August 2026).

Sensitivity labels with default and inherited labeling and public APIs (GA March 2026), Purview DLP policies for Fabric and Power BI (GA September 2025) with restrict-access for structured OneLake data in preview, and every activity captured in Purview Audit.

Logical grouping of workspaces into domains and subdomains with domain admins and contributors, default-domain rules by user or group, and a slice of tenant settings that can be overridden per domain.

An automatically managed service principal per workspace that unlocks trusted workspace access to ADLS Gen2 and shows up in the admin portal's Fabric identities tab (GA January 2026) with Purview and Entra audit trails.

Promoted and certified endorsement with delegated certifiers, admin-defined tags on items (GA April 2025) and workspaces (GA March 2026), and workspace lineage with impact analysis.

A managed application platform built on the Rayfin SDK where decorated TypeScript classes generate schema, endpoints, and row-level authorization, deployed with rayfin up and billed against the workspace capacity.

An opt-in capacity setting (F SKUs, recommended F16 and up during preview) that pays for usage beyond the SKU at the point throttling would otherwise start, checked every five minutes against a rolling 24 hour CU-hour limit that has to fit inside your Fabric quota; when the limit is reached, normal throttling resumes. Surge protection still applies, and billed overages appear in the Capacity Metrics app, Azure Cost Management, and Real-Time hub capacity events.

The open-source fab command line (pip-installable, Python 3.10 or later) with interactive, service principal, certificate, and managed identity login; v1.5 (GA March 2026) added one-command workspace deployment with fabric-cicd, Power BI scenario support, a pre-installed CLI in notebooks, and Python 3.13.

Frontend Entra token access, item definition storage, per-item OneLake folders with shortcuts, standard CRUD APIs, iframe relaxation, and self-service workload publishing (both GA March 2026).

A workspace item holding typed variables and item references with one active value set per stage, consumed by pipelines, shortcuts, notebooks, Dataflow Gen2, Copy job, user data functions, and Plan.

The admin-installed monitoring app with Health, Compute, Storage, timepoint, and Spark autoscale pages plus the Chargeback app (GA May 2026), alongside surge protection for background operations (GA June 2025) with workspace-level surge protection in preview.

Folders are organizational units inside a workspace (ten nesting levels, workspace-inherited permissions, most item types creatable inside them; Dataflow Gen2 and streaming items still land at the root). Task flows are a canvas above the item list with predefined or custom tasks typed by stage (get, mirror, store, prepare, analyze, track, visualize, distribute, develop) and connectors that document relationships rather than move data. A Folder REST API (preview, Apr 2025) automates folder management.

Workspace-level sync with Azure DevOps, GitHub, and GitHub Enterprise Cloud (data residency GA June 2026), preserving folder structure and honoring workspace network security rules.

Azure-billed F2 through F8192 capacities measured in capacity units, per-second billing with optional reservations, and workspace types that decide which items a workspace can hold; P SKUs are being retired in favor of F.

A cross-workspace Activities page listing up to 100 recent runs from the past 30 days per item with status, timing, and error details, filterable by status, item type, time window, submitter, and workspace, with a 30 day history per activity; the Schedule failures page (preview, Apr 2026) manages failure-notification recipients for scheduled items in one place, semantic models excepted.

Stage-to-stage cloning of supported items with item pairing, folder hierarchy preservation, and REST APIs, with a redesigned UI in preview and enhanced-metadata semantic models required since February 2026.

The REST API foundation for item CRUD, definitions, capacity, access, and jobs, the Terraform provider for Fabric (GA March 2025) for environments, and the fabric-cicd Python library, which the docs call the most widely adopted deployment tool.