Fabric Weekly

Issue 6

11^th August 2026

👋 Welcome to issue #6 of Fabric Weekly!

This week, on the official side:

Item Recovery becomes the default on 16 August. Yulia Turchin sets out what's changing: any tenant that has never explicitly configured Item Recovery will have it switched on with a three-day retention window, and new tenants will start with it enabled.
Roberto Cervantes has started a series on event-driven Fabric, opening with how to choose the right event pillar - Business Events, Fabric Events and Azure Events overlap enough to be confusing, and this sets out what each one is actually for.
Sidney Cirqueira walks through choosing your medallion pattern in Fabric Data Warehouse, and how you team's expertise should factor into the decision-making.

From the community:

James Serra has written a great piece about when to use OneLake shortcuts, and when not to.
Reza Rad demos Rayfin's Data App template, building a TypeScript frontend over a Power BI semantic model from a handful of AI prompts.
Ginger Grant joined Aleksi Partanen to ask whether you really need GitHub Copilot for Fabric development after moving to Claude Code because of June's pricing changes..
And we've been looking at how the Formula Engine and Storage Engine divide up the work behind a DAX query - useful background if you've ever inherited a model and need to work out why it's running so slowly.

New this issue: Community & Events. We're adding a standing section at the bottom of the newsletter listing upcoming Fabric and Power BI user group meetups, so you can see what's on. At the moment this is scoped to the UK, but if you are aware of a local group that you think should be included, please feel free to send through the meetup link!

Here are four upcoming events across the UK (most of them online!):

Thursday 13 August, online - Microsoft Fabric UK host Edinson Medina of Microsoft on end-to-end CI/CD in Fabric: branching a feature workspace, environment-specific settings with parameter.yml, and merging up through environments.
Thursday 20 August, online - Fabric & Power BI Wales hold their monthly session. The speaker hasn't been announced yet, so keep an eye on the listing.
Thursday 27 August, Salford - PBIMCR present Ghost in the Aether, a murder mystery built on Microsoft Fabric, from David Mitchell and Adrian Critchley, followed by Craig Porteous on centralising versus federating your lakehouse. Hosted at Matillion.
Tuesday 8 September, online - Devon & Cornwall Power BI on MCPs, Skills and Plugins.

🤖 Copilot, AI & Agents

Build agent with AI for Data Agent (Preview) by Shreyas C. · 4 min read An AI assistant on the Data Agent ribbon that explores your schema and query history to generate agent instructions, data source descriptions and example queries, then validates them with read-only queries before you apply — in preview, for SQL and Eventhouse sources only.
Skip the Fabric Data Agent (Copilot Studio + Power BI MCP) by Aleksi Partanen Oskari demonstrates how to bypass the Fabric data agent by connecting Copilot Studio directly to Power BI’s remote MCP server, simplifying maintenance while achieving seamless integration.

📊 Reporting & Insights

Restoring alternating rows in Power BI matrices with Fluent 2 by Marco Russo · 1 min read To restore alternating row colors in Power BI matrix visuals, change the Style property from "None" to "Default.
Using Detail Rows Expressions To Drill To A Different Fact Table In Power BI by Chris Webb · 4 min read Detail Rows Expressions can point a measure's drill-through at a hidden DirectQuery fact table, giving users transaction-level detail behind an aggregated Import table without building a formal aggregation — with tighter control over what they can pull, but only in Excel PivotTables.
Rayfin Data App — The Future of Power BI Reporting by Reza Rad · 8 min read Reza Rad builds a Power BI report frontend in TypeScript on Project Rayfin's Data App template, generated from a semantic model by AI prompts — and makes the licensing case: viewers need no Power BI Pro licence, so an F2 capacity at roughly $156-250 a month replaces per-user Pro costs regardless of audience size.
Unlock the Power of the Unichar() Function in Power BI by Kamal Sharma · 2 min read The Unichar() function in Power BI converts Unicode numeric codes into text characters for custom icons, emoji data labeling, internationalization, and visual styling.
Last Refresh Date in Power BI by Gaurav Lakhotia · 2 min read This guide shows how to add a "Last Refreshed Date" column in Power BI using M code, allowing users to see data staleness and verify automatic refresh functionality.
Dynamic Top N Analysis in Power BI using DAX (With Slicers) by Kamal Sharma · 2 min read This guide shows how to create a Dynamic Top N analysis in Power BI using DAX and slicers, enabling users to interactively select the number of top records (e.g., 5, 10, or 15) to view in reports, enhancing flexibility and user experience.
Optimising DAX: The Formula Engine and Storage Engine by Carmel Eve · 3 min read Understanding how Power BI's Formula Engine handles complex calculations while the Storage Engine efficiently processes data is key to optimizing DAX query performance.
Watch me Clean Messy Data using Claude by Chandeep Chhabra · 1 min read The video demonstrates Claude generating Power BI queries from messy LinkedIn data but highlights issues such as hard-coded paths and incorrect date handling that may cause unnoticed errors.

⚙️ Data Engineering

You're Using AI Wrong for Microsoft Fabric Development by Aleksi Partanen This video shows how to set up a tool-agnostic environment for speeding up Microsoft Fabric development using instruction files and reference materials, emphasizing the AGENTS.md standard file and free MCP servers to match official documentation.
Evaluate Fabric workload performance with the modern evaluation engine for VNet data gateways (Preview) by Goutham Upadhyaya · 3 min read The modern evaluation engine for VNet data gateways in Fabric lets organizations test improved performance on Mashup evaluations without altering their existing network setup, offering insights into refresh speeds and DirectQuery cold-start behavior during preview.
Automate recurring business logic with scheduled User Data Functions in Microsoft Fabric (Preview) by Sunitha Muthukrishna · 3 min read Scheduled User Data Functions in Microsoft Fabric automate custom business logic such as data validation, feedback processing, and notifications with built-in recurring execution, simplifying workflow management.
Dataflow Gen1 Retirement – What It Means and How to Prepare by Kamal Sharma · 2 min read Microsoft is retiring Power BI Dataflow Gen1 to adopt Dataflow Gen2 in its Fabric ecosystem for better performance, integration, and modern features.
Choosing your medallion pattern in Fabric Data Warehouse by Sidney Cirqueira · 4 min read Choosing the right medallion pattern-whether all-in-one Data Warehouse or a Lakehouse + Warehouse hybrid-in Fabric Data Warehouse hinges on data structure needs and team skill sets, with clear layer separation recommended for governance.
Choose the right event pillar in Microsoft Fabric: Business Events, Fabric Events, and Azure Events by Roberto Cervantes · 1 min read This series explains how to select between Business Events, Fabric Events, and Azure Events in Microsoft Fabric based on your architecture needs and scalability goals.
Design a Business Event schema that consumers can act on by Roberto Cervantes · 1 min read This article guides you through designing a flexible Business Event schema for easy processing in an event-driven architecture within Microsoft Fabric.
Fabric's GPU Warehouse: "7x Faster." The Cost? Nobody Knows by Aleksi Partanen Fabric’s GPU Warehouse delivers up to seven times faster query performance, but the increased compute unit (CU) requirements and exact cost remain undisclosed.
Is Azure Data Factory Going Away? Microsoft's Answer by Aleksi Partanen While Azure Data Factory remains operational, upcoming features like Copilot, Managed Catalog, and Claude Code support will be exclusive to the newer Fabric Data Factory platform.
Bring your data to Fabric: Many ways, One decision by Dominic Godfroid A practical decision framework for BI professionals moving to Fabric, mapping latency, volume, source type, transformation needs and capacity cost onto the right ingestion method — Shortcut, Copy Activity, Dataflow Gen2 or Mirroring — with live demos of why you would pick each.

🏛️ Storage & Platform

Lakehouse or Warehouse for Your Bronze Layer? by Aleksi Partanen Teemu advocates storing the bronze layer as untransformed raw files in a lakehouse format rather than in a traditional warehouse, emphasizing flexibility for downstream use cases.
Enabling Item Recovery by default in Microsoft Fabric by Yulia Turchin · 4 min read Starting August 16, 2026, all new and previously unconfigured Fabric tenants will have Item Recovery enabled by default with a three-day retention window.
Microsoft Fabric OneLake Shortcuts: When to Use Them and When Not To by James Serra · 7 min read A decision guide for OneLake shortcuts: when zero-copy access across workspaces, tenants and clouds is the right call, why a Tables shortcut needs a genuine Delta table while a Files shortcut is not SQL-queryable on its own, and when cold reads, caching limits and source dependency make a physical copy the better choice.

💰 Management & Cost

When Terraform Is Actually Worth It in Microsoft Fabric by Aleksi Partanen Heini's rule of thumb for Microsoft Fabric: Terraform earns its place when you have many workspaces needing identical settings, since it creates each one consistently — but with only a handful, doing it by hand is often faster.
Recommended versions of GitHub to use with Microsoft Fabric by Kevin Chant · 1 min read Kevin Chant's recommendations for which version of GitHub suits which Microsoft Fabric scenario, from configuring Fabric Git integration through to operationalising fabric-cicd for CI/CD.
Terraform or Bicep for Microsoft Fabric? Wrong Question by Aleksi Partanen Heini's view is that choosing between Terraform and Bicep for Microsoft Fabric is the wrong question — use whichever your team already works with; the real mistake is adopting a brand-new tool just for Fabric.
One Word in a Terraform Plan Can Delete Your Data by Aleksi Partanen The video emphasizes Heini's rule to double-check any "destroy" actions in a Terraform plan, especially for data assets, to prevent accidental loss of critical information.
Fabric Workspace Monitoring Is Way Too Expensive by Aleksi Partanen The video critiques Microsoft Fabric’s workspace monitoring for its high cost due to heavy resource usage, especially when scaling across many workspaces.
Over $200 a Month for GitHub Copilot? She Went $200 a Year Instead by Aleksi Partanen Ginger Grant demonstrates how opting for GitHub Copilot’s annual $200 plan saves her over $2,000 a year compared to the previously reported monthly cost of more than $200.
Do You Really Need GitHub Copilot for Microsoft Fabric? by Aleksi Partanen Microsoft Data Platform MVP Ginger Grant explains why she moved her Microsoft Fabric development from GitHub Copilot to Claude Code after the June pricing changes, and demos a Git-based workflow that edits Fabric notebooks locally without consuming capacity.

📅 Community & Events

Microsoft Fabric UK: End-to-End Microsoft Fabric CI/CD — Thursday 13 August, online Microsoft Fabric UK's August webinar walks through a complete CI/CD workflow in Fabric, from branching a feature workspace to merging into higher environments.
Fabric & Power BI Wales: August meetup (session TBA) — Thursday 20 August, online Fabric & Power BI Wales holds its monthly online session on 20 August; the speaker and topic have not been announced yet.
PBIMCR: Ghost in the Aether — a murder mystery built on Microsoft Fabric — Thursday 27 August, Salford Manchester's August meetup pairs an interactive murder mystery built entirely on Fabric with a session on choosing between centralised and federated lakehouse architectures.
Devon & Cornwall: MCPs, Skills and Plugins — Tuesday 8 September, online Cristi Prifti opens the Devon and Cornwall group's autumn programme with a session on what MCPs, skills and plugins are and why they matter.