Microsoft Fabric New Features
November 2024 Microsoft Fabric Preview Highlights
Microsoft Fabric is continually evolving month by month, and transitioning from a data analytics platform to a fully integrated data platform with the introduction of a transactional database service - Fabric SQL Database.
At the time of writing - November 24th 2024 - there are 55 features in preview!
I have highlighted 3 preview features that everyone should know about:
- Azure Data Factory item - Connect to an existing Azure Data Factory from a Fabric workspace.
- Fabric SQL database - transactional database in Fabric based on Azure SQL Database
- varchar(max) and varbinary(max) support - support for these data types in Fabric Warehouse
If you are interested in the full list of preview features you can find them here. My top 3 are outlined below.
Azure Data Factory Item
This feature allows you to manage an existing ADF from a Fabric workspace - trigger , execute and monitor pipelines from within Fabric
Fabric SQL Database
Fabric SQL is not a 100% match for Azure SQL but offers many of the core features such as:
- Database scoped credentials
- Database level roles
- TempDB Database
- Temporary tables
- Columnstore indexes - clustered and nonclustered
- Optimised locking
- Database mirroring
- Performance dashboard
The resource limits for the preview version are lower than those of Azure SQL but may increase in the future:
- 32 vCores maximum compared with 128 in Azure SQL Database
- Maximum 4TB storage compared with 128TB in Azure SQL Database
- TempDB maximum size of 1024GB compared with 2560GB in Azure SQL Database
For the full features list take a look here.
varchar(max) and varbinary(max) support
Fabric SQL Database will enable text content to be stored enabling free text comments, notes and lengthy text objects up to 1MB in size to be stored within the transactional database. This enables JSON and spatial data to be stored within a database column.
For full details take a look here.
Exciting times are ahead for Microsoft Fabric and all those that choose it as a preferred platform If you need any guidance or advice on how to migrate to Fabric or determine if your data journey can benefit from what Microsoft Fabric brings to the world of data analytics and transactional data solutions our team are her to help. You can contact us here, call us on 0118 979 4000 or email us at info@ptr.co.uk.
