Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog

What’s new in Fabric Warehouse – July 2025 Recap

• AI
• Announcements
• Data Engineering
• Data Warehouse
• Fabric platform
• Fabric Public APIs
• Microsoft Fabric
• Roadmap

• August 5, 2025 von Charles Webb 57.780 Ansichten

Introduction

Welcome to What’s New in Fabric Warehouse, where we’ll spotlight our work improving quality, delivering major performance enhancements, boosting developer productivity, and our continuous investments in security. Whether you’re migrating from Synapse, optimizing your workloads, writing SQL in VS Code, or exploring new APIs, this roundup has something for every data professional. With quality and experience at the forefront, we’ve summarized and highlighted key improvements we think you’ll love, organized into three sections:

1. What’s New
2. Docs Updates
3. Roadmap Updates

What’s New

Here’s a list of the latest improvements to your workflow – with summaries to help.

Ingest, Load, and Sync Data

Get data into Fabric from multiple sources with flexibility, automation, and governance.

1. Fabric Data Warehouse Migration Assistant: Better, Faster, More Reliable
   The Migration Assistant offers a guided, AI-powered experience to help you move from Synapse or SQL Server to Fabric Warehouse. Now improved with additional, intelligent experiences for migration summaries, object-level diagnostics, and fix suggestions, it’s never been easier to modernize your data estate.
2. Simplifying Data Ingestion with Copy job: Copy Data from Database View, Sample Dataset, and New Connectors
   Copy job now supports ingesting from database views, built-in sample datasets, and new connectors like MongoDB Atlas and Azure AI Search. These enhancements simplify onboarding and expand data movement capabilities, making it easier than ever to get data into the Fabric Warehouse.
3. Announcing Cosmos DB in Microsoft Fabric with Exciting New Features (Preview)
   Cosmos DB is now in preview in Fabric, offering NoSQL capabilities with automatic mirroring to OneLake. It supports real-time analytics, AI-powered apps, and unified data access across structured and semi-structured sources. For customers building apps and looking for built-in analytics with SQL and Warehouses – this is a gamechanger.
4. Unified by Design: Mirroring Azure Databricks Unity Catalog in Microsoft Fabric (Generally Available)
   Fabric now supports mirroring Azure Databricks Unity Catalog, enabling seamless access to Databricks-managed datasets in OneLake. This integration supports Power BI Direct Lake and GraphQL APIs with real-time insights. For customers using Databricks for ETL/ELT, this an amazing way to take advantage of the Fabric warehousing capabilities with a built in SQL Analytics endpoint for serving – and a fully transactional Warehouse a cross-database query away.
5. New in OneLake: Access Your Delta Lake Tables as Iceberg Automatically
   OneLake now supports automatic virtualization of Delta Lake tables as Iceberg format. This enables broader compatibility with analytics tools and simplifies cross-platform data access without data movement. For customers tired of the format wars, this is a ‘titanic’ release for data warehousing.
6. Refresh SQL Analytics Endpoint Metadata REST API (Generally Available)
   The Metadata Sync REST API for SQL Analytics Endpoints is now generally available. It allows programmatic refresh of metadata to keep SQL endpoints in sync with Lakehouse and mirrored sources, with updated response formats and improved reliability.
7. COPY INTO and OPENROWSET from OneLake (Preview)
   Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse now supports direct ingestion and querying of files stored in OneLake Lakehouse folders using COPY INTO and OPENROWSET commands—no external staging, SAS tokens, or complex permissions required. Customers can now effortlessly load CSV and Parquet files or run ad hoc queries directly from Lakehouse files, accelerating analytics and pipeline automation at scale.

Query, Transform, and Optimize for Insights

Write performant, reusable SQL and run queries fast – at scale.

1. What’s new and coming soon in SQL analytics endpoint in Fabric
   From GA of the metadata sync REST API to support for case-insensitive collation and planned improvements for reliability, data freshness and performance, this post outlines key improvements that make SQL endpoints more reliable and developer-friendly. There’s a Private Preview announcement here you won’t want to miss!
2. Inline Scalar UDFs in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse (Preview)
   Scalar UDFs are now supported in preview! This feature unlocks modular, reusable logic in T-SQL while maintaining high performance through inlining.
3. How to make your SQL scalar user-defined function (UDF) inlineable in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse
   Learn how to optimize your scalar UDFs for inlining to boost performance. This post breaks down common anti-patterns and shows how to refactor for speed.
4. Fabric Warehouse Performance Guide
   A must-read for performance tuning: this guide covers best practices for ingestion, indexing, query optimization, and concurrency management in Fabric Warehouse.
5. Result Set Caching (Preview)
   Improve query performance with result set caching. This feature stores the output of eligible T-SQL SELECT queries and returns them quickly on subsequent runs, speeding up execution time for repetitive workloads.
6. Intelligent Garbage Collection
   Automatically identify and purge stale or redundant data to keep your warehouse lean and performant. This post explains how smart purging works and how to configure it.
7. Connect to Your SQL Database, SQL Analytics Endpoint, and Warehouse in Fabric Using Python Notebooks
   Fabric now supports T-SQL magic commands in Python notebooks, allowing users to query SQL databases, Fabric Warehouses, and SQL endpoints directly. This enables interactive workflows combining Python, SQL, scripting, and visualization in a single environment.
   

Secure, Govern, and Manage with Confidence

Ensure compliance, governance, and transparency for your data and models.

1. Core Security Capabilities in Fabric Warehouse
   Fabric Warehouse already protects your data with features like native integration with Entra ID, conditional access, object, column, and row-level security or data masking. This helps control who can see and change your data and support compliance rules. Following Zero Trust, it keeps checking access to keep your data safe. Soon, workspace private links will add more protection by limiting network access and further enabling governance.
2. Sunsetting Default Semantic Models – Microsoft Fabric
   As a direct result of your feedback – Fabric is phasing out auto-generated semantic models to give users more control and governance with custom semantic models, which you already know, use, and love. Learn how this change improves transparency, optionality, and lifecycle management for your data assets – and enjoy the ability to easily create custom semantic models – direct lake or otherwise – directly from the warehouse ribbon.
3. Improved experience for creating items in Fabric
   A redesigned creation flow makes it easier to spin up warehouses, lakehouses, and semantic models with fewer clicks and more clarity.
4. Visual SQL Audit Logs Configuration Now in Fabric Warehouse
   Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse introduces a new visual interface to easily configure and manage SQL Audit Logs. With simple toggles, precise event selection, and flexible retention settings. This update delivers clearer control and easier compliance for data engineers, security admins, and analytics leads.
5. Simplifying Governance with Unified Audit Operations in Microsoft Fabric
   To simplify governance and improve traceability, Microsoft Fabric consolidates duplicated audit entries by grouping all create, read, update, and delete actions into standardized events—reducing noise and making audits more actionable.

Enable AI, Copilot & Agentic Workflows

Enable Copilot and AI to reason over data in Warehouse to deliver insights throughout your organization.

1. Accelerating Insights from Unstructured Text with AI-Powered OneLake Shortcut Transformations
   Fabric introduces AI-powered shortcut transformations that convert unstructured text into Delta tables using summarization, sentiment analysis, and PII detection—no pipelines required. Simplifying your workflows analyzing data in the SQL endpoint and warehouse.
2. Expanded Data Agent Support for Large Data Sources
   This update significantly broadens the scope of what users can achieve with Fabric data agent, enabling deeper insights, richer semantic modeling, and more robust AI-powered data experiences.
3. Fabric Data Agents + Microsoft Copilot Studio: A New Era of Multi-Agent Orchestration
   This preview introduces multi-agent orchestration by connecting Fabric Data Agents with Copilot Studio. Agents can now collaborate using Model Context Protocols (MCP), enabling richer, more complete responses across your warehouse or sql endpoint data.
4. Empowering Agentic AI by Integrating Fabric with Azure AI Foundry
   Fabric Data Agents now integrate with Azure AI Foundry, enabling organizations to build intelligent, domain-specific AI agents grounded in enterprise data. These agents can query across warehouses, sql endpoints, and semantic models to deliver contextual insights.

Build, Develop & Deploy with Modern Tooling

Empower developers and data engineers with CLI, IDE, and CI/CD tools for Fabric.

1. Terraform Provider for Microsoft Fabric v1: Accelerating First Steps Using the CLIs
   This guide walks through setting up the Terraform provider for Microsoft Fabric using CLI tools. It covers authentication, app registration, and deploying a Fabric capacity using infrastructure-as-code. Another huge compliment to the industry leading CI/CD support from APIs, web CI/CD experiences, and of course VSCode support that already exists today – and operationalizes the possibilities for everything as code.
2. MSSQL Extension for VS Code: What’s new and what’s next
   The MSSQL extension for Visual Studio Code v1.29.0 introduces enhanced UI components like the Connection Dialog, Object Explorer, and Table Designer, along with expanded schema management tools such as Schema Designer and Schema Compare. It supports seamless local-to-cloud development using Local Database Containers, Dev Containers, and CI/CD-ready cloud deployments. Full support for Fabric Warehouse is coming soon, complementing the existing preview support for SQL Database in Fabric.

Docs Updates

July’s key documentation updates:

• What’s New in Fabric
  Continuously updated with the latest features, fixes, and enhancements across Fabric.
• Migration Assistant Guide
  Step-by-step instructions for using the new Migration Assistant, including DACPAC support and troubleshooting tips.
• SQL Analytics Endpoint Metadata Sync API
  Learn how to programmatically refresh metadata and avoid stale data in your SQL endpoints.
• Security Fundamentals
  Updated to reflect new features like row-level security, workspace IP firewalls, and customer-managed keys.

Roadmap Updates

A sneak peak of what’s coming next for Fabric Warehouse and SQL Endpoints, from our roadmap:

• Copilot Enhancements
• Custom SQL Pools
• Data Clustering
• IDENTITY columns
• Incremental and Proactive Statistics Refresh
• MERGE
• Migration Assistant Enhancements
• One Lake Security Support
• Outbound Access Protection
• Warehouse Shortcuts
• Workspace-level Private Link

Got a feature idea? Submit it to https://aka.ms/fabricideas

Next Steps

Ready to supercharge your data game? Don’t just read about Fabric—experience it:

• Try Fabric for Free – No Credit Card Required and see what the hype is all about.
• Got questions or want to swap ideas? Join the conversation on Reddit or connect with peers in the Fabric Community

Let’s build the future of data—together. You, your data, and Fabric.