Problem
Microsoft Build is an annual developer conference aimed at software engineers and developers using Microsoft products and services, such as Azure, AI, Fabric and .NET. The conference was held in Seattle from May 19-22, 2025. The event is a huge source of news about the different Microsoft products. In this tip, we’ll focus on Microsoft Fabric announcements regarding the Microsoft Fabric data platform.
Solution
Microsoft Fabric celebrated its 2nd birthday at MS Build, having been publicly announced at MS Build 2023. A lot has changed in those two years, and many features and services have been added to Fabric in the meantime. As with all big Microsoft conferences, such as Build, Ignite, and FabCon, there were a lot of announcements for Fabric. In this tip, we’ll try to weed through the avalanche of news updates and summarize them, linking to relevant resources when applicable.
Microsoft Fabric Announcements from MS Build 2025
The Microsoft Fabric Roadmap Tool
Fabric is a big platform that combines many products and services. It’s hard to keep track of what is new, what is coming, and what is still missing from the product. The new Microsoft Fabric Roadmap Tool is a centralized hub to view upcoming features and changes that have already been released. For example, we can see identity columns are planned (soon!) for the Fabric Warehouse:
Translytical Workflows in Power BI
A very important update for Power BI is “translytical” (a combination of the words transactional and analytical) workflows. These workflows use Fabric User Data Functions to achieve certain use cases like write-back, triggering workflows, AI integration, or annotations within a Power BI report. To support these use cases, new preview versions of the text, button, and list slicer visual have been published. To enable translytical Power BI workflows, check the feature itself and the new visuals in the preview settings.
In Fabric, you need to enable user data functions as well.
Learn more about the new feature: Translytical task flows (Preview) and Understand translytical task flows (preview). Keep in mind that there are some limitations. For example, Power BI Projects (PBIP) or the enhanced report format (PBIR) are not supported yet, and neither is Power BI Embedded.
Microsoft Fabric Cosmos DB
Another database type has been added to Fabric: Cosmos DB! Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed, globally distributed NoSQL database that mainly serves as a document database (but there are many other APIs available, such as MongoDB, Cassandra, and Table Storage). This offering has now found its way into Fabric (not to be mistaken for the mirrored version of Cosmos DB).
Source: Fabric May 2025 Feature Summary
At the time of writing, this feature is in private preview and only the NoSQL API is supported. Learn more about Microsoft Fabric Cosmos DB from the official blog post.
Fabric CLI is Now Generally Available
The Fabric CLI (command line interface) is now out of preview. With the Fabric CLI, daily management tasks are simplified as you don’t need to write many lines of code to call different REST APIs. It treats a Fabric workspace like a file system, and operations, like creating, moving, listing, or deleting objects, will feel very familiar to people who are used to working from within a console.
You can also use the Fabric CLI to simplify your Devops pipelines and automate workflows since service principal login is now also supported. Learn more about the CLI: Fabric CLI: explore and automate Microsoft Fabric from your terminal (Generally Available).
Warehouse Snapshots
Sometimes, when you are in the middle of an ETL process, you don’t want users to query your warehouse live because they might query data in an intermediary state. To solve this issue, warehouse snapshots are introduced. You can create a snapshot right before your ETL runs, and your users can now query a consistent view of all the tables in your warehouse. At the end of the ETL, you forward the snapshot to the current point in time to reflect the latest changes. Warehouse snapshots are quite similar to database snapshots in SQL Server.
You can create a snapshot of a warehouse through the REST API or manually in the portal.
The snapshot will be a child item of the warehouse in the portal.
When connecting to your Fabric workspace with SSMS, the snapshot will not be visible in the Object Explorer, but you can find it in the database dropdown:
For all means and purposes, the snapshot will behave as a normal Fabric warehouse.
Updating a snapshot’s timestamp can be done with T-SQL:
--MSSQLTips.com
ALTER DATABASE wh_snapshot_myfirstsnapshot
SET TIMESTAMP = CURRENT_TIMESTAMP; To learn more about warehouse snapshots, check out the official blog post.
Other Announcements
- Fabric CI/CD Improvements
- Service principal support for Azure Devops.
- Azure Devops cross-tenant support. This means Fabric and Azure Devops don’t need to be in the same tenant anymore.
- Extended support for variable libraries. Previously, this was only in data pipelines. Now, shortcuts (for the lakehouse), notebooks, and the scheduler are supported as well.
- Digital Twin Builder
- A new item in Real-Time Intelligence, allowing you to create digital representations of real-world scenarios. It’s currently in preview.
- You can learn more about it in the documentation or by following this tutorial.
- Mirroring Enhancements
- Support for on-premises SQL Server, from 2016 to the new 2025.
- More capabilities for Azure SQL Server Managed Instance and Azure Cosmos DB.
- Customizable retention period.
- Open mirroring is now generally available.
- Fabric Lakehouse
- The Spark Native Execution Engine is now generally available.
- Introduction of Materialized Lake Views (MLV).
Next Steps
- There are many updates and announcements, and we might’ve missed a few. Here are some extra resources:
- You can find all Fabric tips in this overview.
