Microsoft Fabric

On Explicit Measures episode 573, Mike Carlo tried to say "deployment savvy" and invented Deplavity instead. Here is where the slip happened, how it turned into a fake prescription drug, and every video, ad, and jingle made because of it.

Fabric deployment plans let you order deployments and run notebooks or pipelines before and after each item lands, which finally gives data a place in the release. Mike Carlo and Tommy Puglia work out which teams should reach for a plan, which should stay in Git and GitHub Actions, and why both would wait for GA.

The Fabric IQ ontology agent can draft an ontology from a lakehouse, and it still cannot finish the job it just offered to do. Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo hold the preview out of any workspace a client depends on.

Microsoft's Fabric Notebook Toolkit lets an agent you already pay for drive notebooks from a CLI. Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo treat the preview as a tool to learn, not a pattern to hand to every workspace.

Tommy Puglia borrows a four-bucket scale from Fatal Risk and asks where Fabric patterns land: preferred, accepted, discouraged, or unacceptable. Mike Carlo keeps the answer tied to the job, not the artifact.

An anonymous mailbag asks whether Power BI should let people act on a number without leaving the report. Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo put writeback in Fabric apps, keep the report for consumption, and treat translytical task flows as the exception.

Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo draft a team from the FabCon Barcelona feature list, starting with Fabric app backends and the ontology authoring agent. The picks that follow are pay-as-you-go capacity, the Fabric notebook toolkit, deployment hooks, and text search in semantic models.

Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo use Kurt Buhler and Eugene Meidinger's Tabular Editor piece to decide which model and effort level belongs on a Fabric task. The same hour covers FabCon Barcelona's Fabric app backend, semantic views, and why monthly active agents may matter more than monthly active users.

Tommy Puglia, Mike Carlo, and Kurt Buhler spend this episode on what is left of the Power BI identity once Microsoft Fabric and agents are part of the job. The skill that still decides the work is judgment: listening to the business, and staying critical of what an agent hands back.

Power Query is moving a set of cloud connectors from ODBC to ADBC, and legacy Power BI Q&A now stays through February 2027. Kurt Buhler joins Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo to sort out what data literacy and AI literacy require once Microsoft Fabric and agents make it easy to build faster than a team can review.

Fabric Apps can own every pixel of a data experience, and Kurt Buhler is not ready to hand them the executive dashboard. Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo spend the hour on where a Rayfin app fits beside Power BI, and on the design system, the token bill, and the research bench a team needs before it scales.

Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo spend this episode on how a Microsoft Fabric project moves to a team that has to run it. Their model is I build, we build, then you build, and it holds when leadership, trust, and the team's own context stay in place after the builder steps back.

Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo read Rituparna Das's Nightingale guide to using AI in data visualization without an enterprise license, and they ask what those three workflows become when the output is a Power BI report. They also take apart a Fabric warehouse medallion best-practices post and a private-link path for copying data to Snowflake.

Foundry can now find Fabric data agents in the OneLake catalog and attach more than one of them to a single agent. Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo walk through what that changes, from the 15,000-character instruction limit to a CU bill that still deserves a hard look.

On Explicit Measures, Tommy and Mike explain liquid clustering for Delta Lake tables in Microsoft Fabric and why Fabric Runtime 2.0 changes the cost of keeping that layout healthy. They walk Miles Cole's incremental optimize example and Mike's rules for when a Lakehouse Spark job is the right transform.

Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo spend this episode on Microsoft's new guidance for choosing a medallion pattern in the Fabric Data Warehouse. Bronze, silver, and gold still describe the work; the open question is whether a warehouse belongs in every layer.

Eva Sibinga's Nightingale essay argues that large language models hallucinate by design and are sold to look helpful before they are right. Tommy Puglia and Mike Carlo take that diagnosis into Power BI and Microsoft Fabric: a harness of MCP servers, skills, and validated context, plus a prototype refined in stages, is how you keep the visual honest.

Anonymous data access lets a Rayfin app take a public write — a contact form, a game score, an outage report — and store it in a Fabric SQL database without an Entra account. Mike ranks that capability third: the case for Fabric apps is still that the data stays in Fabric, and that an agent can build and fix the app.

Mike has been building apps on Fabric as a backend since January, and he's coining it FAB. The case isn't that you already own Fabric — it's that the workspace identity, git integration, and SQL database remove the wiring you'd otherwise do by hand in Azure.

Mike is deleting paid subscriptions and rebuilding them as Fabric apps; Tommy wants to know who maintains all this and whether enterprise security teams will ever allow it. Plus the licensing discovery of the episode — agents talking to semantic models over XMLA with no Power BI Pro license required.

A mailbag question about request tracking turns into the clearest description yet of what a working harness contains: skills, agents, organized context, and the ability to talk to other harnesses. Plus Mike hits real Rayfin limitations trying to build a simple forms app.

"I built 35 reports this year." "Did anyone look at them?" Mike and Tommy dig into measuring app usage properly — active users over a rolling window rather than raw opens, tied to the business outcome the app was supposed to move.

Part two picks up at the skills and validation layers of Anthropic's analytics stack, and Tommy arrives at a hot take he'll defend: no agentic solution on your Fabric data until governance is in place. Along the way — why perspectives are Power BI's most untapped feature and why Microsoft needs skills for models.

Rayfin lets you build full applications on top of Fabric, and Mike calls it the biggest Microsoft release since Power BI Desktop. This episode covers what Rayfin actually is, why the semantic model matters more than ever, and the handoff problem nobody on your team has solved yet.