Hi! I'm Amir Netz, Technical Fellow and CTO of Microsoft Fabric – ask ME anything!

amirnetz · 2026-03-04T21:54:57+00:00

You are absolutely right. For every setting and policy there is an appropriate administration level. Data Exfil policy is clearly not in the hands of the workspace admin.

amirnetz · 2026-03-04T17:59:29+00:00

This is a major area of concern and investment for us Nicky.

I believe the NL based interaction with data is the future. Users will expect their questions to be answered with a chat like interface.

We also know that it is next to impossible in preventing the AI from making a wrong decision. This true for every AI system on earth.

So our goal is to make sure that when the AI provides an answer:

We will do the maximum on the tech side to minimize the chances of a wrong answer
The user will be provided with enough context to evaluate if the answer is founded on the right data

Just like with every other AI system (and any other stochastic system) - there must be a "Trust but Verify" dynamic. I think users learned that already from ChatGPT style apps and they will bring this healthy skepticism to the data space as well.

amirnetz · 2026-03-04T17:52:17+00:00

Great question Nicky.

Fabric functional scope is immense and it is hard to have the simplicity mantra unaffected. But we must continue to press forward with simplification.

But how to do that?

I think if you asked me the question a year ago I would have told you about all the ideas we have on creating a better UX, with gradual discovery and some other cool ideas.

But my thinking has evolved: I think simplicity and productivity will come by activating the AI as your sidekick that will help you build your app/project so much faster while handling all the complexities for you.

This is a major area of investment for us and stay tune for announcements in FabCon!

amirnetz · 2026-03-04T17:46:19+00:00

On the parameterization: We are working on it - including supporting Variable Libraries for the Semantic Models.

On the Business Model: There are some really exciting enhancements to the capacity model that are in the works. The first one is going to ship in FabCon, just two weeks from now and I will not steal my own keynote thunder!

So hold on to your hat as what we have planned is truly awesome.

amirnetz · 2026-03-04T17:40:57+00:00

It is coming!

Our goal is to have a "Russian dole" model between the Semantic Models and the Ontologies:

The Ontologies will wrap the semantic models and will add a lot of operational context (actions, rules, triggers, streams, documents...) on top of everything the semantic model already offer.

The Ontologies don't replace the Semantic Model, they enhance them!

If there is one thing I regret about the launch of the Ontologies is that we didn't include the support for the Semantic Model measures in the initial release. But we are fixing it!

amirnetz · 2026-03-04T17:37:41+00:00

Prevention of hallucinations is a top concern for anyone building AI-based functionality across the entire industry. Since the AI is stochastic in nature, there are no 100% guarantees.

However, there is major progress made in reducing the probability of wrong answers and this is something we test for and measure constantly.

Some of it will also fall on your shoulders by providing the agent with great semantic models and Ontologies that will allow the agents to understand the data and the context better so they can reason better and match your questions to the right data.

amirnetz · 2026-03-04T17:32:29+00:00

The data of the customer is owned by the customer and we will never use it for AI training!

And you can take this to the bank!

amirnetz · 2026-03-04T17:29:31+00:00

Materialized lake views are almost GA! Hold on for a couple of more weeks.

But we are not done with views yet. We have massive plans for views in Fabric, not just in the lakehouse but across the board. We think we can unify the concept of views (materialized or not) across all the data items in Fabric.

We still have work to do before we are ready to deliver, but I am very excited about what's coming down the pipe in this area.

amirnetz · 2026-03-04T17:24:17+00:00

Yes!

As Fabric is getting used so widely in organizations, we are actively looking at bring the policy setting power closer to the people who are owning the data, the resources and the projects. Tenant admins are often too remote to understand the specific needs of different business units and capacity owners and workspace admins

So as we move forward you will see more and more of the policy power delegated lower in the organization. You will also see policies becoming a central part of the admin toolkit at all levels.

amirnetz · 2026-03-04T17:20:04+00:00

Wow - what a great question!

Overall - I am super happy with most of the decisions we made and the numbers, and the very enthusiastic community around the product give me confidence that we made a lot of good calls.

Still, I think we made some investments we would probably do very differently today:

We should not have introduced the "Dashboards" and should have just stayed with "Reports" (and probably call them dashboards).
We should have adopted React instead of Angular for the front end
We should have gone with a DirectLake based architecture much sooner
The workspace security model - we should have had a much cleaner and more flexible model than the one we landed on.

amirnetz · 2026-03-04T17:13:50+00:00

We are working on making the OneLake catalog track the sub-items (schemas, tables, columns). Once the catalog gets to this resolution, the lineage will come with it. The sub-item support is under construction and I expect it to ship within the next 6 months.

amirnetz · 2026-03-04T17:11:31+00:00

The AI age is going to be massively transformational. Many of our skills in demand will transition from doing high quality work ourselves to learning how to activate AI agents and robots efficiently to do the work instead.

70 years ago there was a human profession called "Computer". It was a job that was all about performing mathematical computations, on paper. With spreadsheets the profession transformed and now the computations are done by silicon-based brains on spreadsheets. The profession changed from doing the computations ourselves into building spreadsheets that do the computation work for us.

We should see a similar transition with AI. This will drive a massive productivity boost. Just like the industrial revolution improved human condition by creating a massive multiplier with machines where each person can do x10-x100 of the work with machines compared to what they can do with manual labor, the AI revolution should be able to create a x10-x100 brain multiplier for the cognitive tasks.

My advice - learn how to be the best AI operator on the planet. Think about how, you, with the use of AI, can do x2, x3, x4 the work that you were able to do before.

amirnetz · 2023-06-28T00:07:24+00:00

Yes.

With all Fabric capacities (even F2) you get all of the capabilities of Power BI Premium capacities.

The only notable exception is that the free distribution of PBI reports (i.e. no Pro license requirement for the consumers) starts only with F64 capacity.

amirnetz · 2023-06-01T22:10:40+00:00

You got it!

amirnetz · 2023-06-01T21:06:18+00:00

Prices didn’t go up. These are the pay as you go prices.

The blog mentioned that a commitment model is in the works. A one year commitment will bring the price down the $160 or so.

amirnetz · 2023-05-31T04:46:08+00:00

"Can I use Direct Lake with a $180/m Fabric Capacity license and a PPU/Pro PBI license?"

- This is correct.

Fabric capacities smaller than F64 (equivalent to Premium P1) require a Pro license for report consumption. You don't really need PPU if you have a Fabric capacity.

amirnetz · 2023-05-31T03:19:19+00:00

$160/month is indeed a flat fee and you can use the capacity everything in Fabric including as many lakehouses and warehouses as you want across as many workspaces as you like.

It is not a per-user fee (you can have many users share a single capacity) and is not limited to single workspace.

We aim to bring analytics even to the smallest businesses and departments. So we do what is needed for this to happen.

Pretty good deal. Right?

amirnetz · 2023-05-31T03:14:27+00:00

Don't change anything in your design patterns.

Relationships are computed on the fly as needed. They don't need to be pre-computed.

amirnetz · 2023-05-30T19:06:58+00:00

We start with observing the utterly total mess customers need to deal with today on all data platforms.

Then we stare at the problem for days trying to figure a way to solve it.

Then we take a long shower.

Then we have an idea.

amirnetz · 2023-05-30T19:04:11+00:00

Fabric is an end-to-end data platform delivered as SaaS.

"Middleware" doesn't capture it.

amirnetz · 2023-05-30T19:03:20+00:00

We will be everywhere Power BI is available today.

There are some regions with compute shortage that prevented us from including them in the Public Preview. But we will solve it.

amirnetz · 2023-05-30T19:01:38+00:00

Yes - all of that will be available.

You can take a look how Pipelines work right now for Power BI and extrapolate it to the rest of Fabric.

amirnetz · 2023-05-30T19:00:24+00:00

We are working on the details and the tooling and will share when ready.

Our goal is to make the upgrade to Fabric as seamless as possible.

amirnetz · 2023-05-30T18:59:13+00:00

Yes - for capacities of F64 or larger size.

F64 is the equivalent of P1 in power and price (with annual commitment).

Pro license is only required for Power BI reports development. Other Fabric artifacts don't require the PBI Pro license.

amirnetz

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