Browse All Machine Learning Content (239)

Sunitha Muthukrishna announces a public preview feature in Microsoft Fabric API for GraphQL that lets you enforce custom authorization rules via an Authorizer User Data Function, enabling policy-based access decisions using request context like user identity, roles, and tenant information.

stclarke summarizes SAP Sapphire 2026 announcements focused on running SAP workloads on Azure and moving enterprise AI from pilots to production, including Azure OpenAI + Copilot Studio scenarios, Microsoft Fabric connectivity to SAP data, sovereign cloud options for regulated industries, and Sentinel-based monitoring for SAP landscapes.

Authorised Territory demonstrates a .NET data ingestion pipeline that converts a PDF to Markdown via the MarkItDown MCP server, generates embeddings with a local Ollama model, and stores those embeddings in SQL Server 2025 running in Docker Desktop.

Michael Flanakin summarizes FinOps toolkit 14, including a Copilot Studio agent template for querying FinOps hub data with KQL, a new recommendations pipeline that ingests Azure Advisor and Resource Graph results, a simplified hub deployment UI, and a preview dataset for commitment discount eligibility.

Shreyas Canchi Radhakrishna announces a preview update to Microsoft Fabric Data Agent that expands how it can query Eventhouse KQL databases by understanding user-defined functions, materialized views, and shortcut tables, improving consistency, performance, and access to external data sources.

Roberto Cervantes Rivero announces a preview feature in Microsoft Fabric: Eventstream can now publish Business Events directly to Real-Time Hub as a native destination. The post explains what Business Events are (schema-defined, governed signals), when no-code publishing fits, and when custom code via notebooks or user data functions is still needed.

Iqra Shaikh explains why treating database schema changes like application code—stored in Git and shipped via pull requests—reduces risk and improves traceability, and how SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric supports this workflow with built-in Git integration for GitHub and Azure DevOps.

Amir Jafari announces preview support for service principal (SPN) authentication for Microsoft Fabric data agents, explaining why app identities matter for production deployments and outlining two common patterns: calling a data agent directly from a custom app, or routing through a Microsoft Foundry agent.

Matt Basile introduces OneLake storage tiers and lifecycle management in Microsoft Fabric (preview), explaining how admins can reduce long-term storage costs by automatically moving files between hot, cool, and cold tiers while accounting for the trade-off of higher transaction, retrieval, and capacity (CU) costs.

Ambika Jagadish announces a preview feature in Microsoft Fabric Warehouse that lets teams configure how many days of historical data versions are retained (1–120 days) using a single T-SQL command, enabling time travel queries, point-in-time clones, restore points, and warehouse snapshots.

FaizaanMerchant explains a Zero Trust network design for Azure Databricks that avoids public workspace exposure by fronting external access with Azure Application Gateway WAF and routing traffic to the workspace through Private Endpoints, while keeping internal access on private connectivity (VPN/ExpressRoute).

Mariya Ali and Twinkle Cyril introduce Data Warehouse Monitor (Preview) in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse, a unified UI for viewing running and completed queries together, analyzing performance across executions, spotting regressions and recurring slow queries, and cancelling problematic queries directly from the monitoring experience.

stclarke describes a Microsoft Research open dataset and pipeline that builds geographically grounded, electrically coherent U.S. transmission-grid models from public data, enabling AC optimal power flow studies at scales from small state networks to the full Eastern Interconnection.

Shireesh Thota summarizes the main architecture trends from Cosmos DB Conf 2026, focusing on how teams are building AI-native apps on Azure Cosmos DB with flexible data models, serverless scale, and first-class semantic/vector search, plus practical patterns for agent memory, cost visibility, and multi-user security.

robece announces General Availability of Stripe as a partner event source for Azure Event Grid, and outlines how to route Stripe events into Azure services (Functions, Logic Apps, Event Hubs, Service Bus) and Microsoft Fabric Eventstream for real-time processing and analytics.

John Savill explains why enterprises need a data virtualization layer and how to build one using Microsoft Fabric OneLake, including a single namespace approach, shortcuts, mirroring, governance, and semantic models to make data easier to use for analytics and AI.

John Savill's Technical Training gives a quick overview of why enterprises often need a data virtualization layer, and how it helps provide a unified way to access data across different systems.

This roundup tracks a clear shift from agent capability to agent governance: more context, more observability, and more policy controls across Copilot, VS Code, and the CLI. On the platform side, Microsoft tightened the path from prototype to production with .NET agent building blocks, Azure AI Foundry deployment patterns, and data governance improvements that make RAG and operations easier to standardize. We also cover the less flashy work that keeps systems dependable at scale, including Fabric and Databricks operational updates, GitHub migration and ruleset changes, and security research that keeps token theft, privilege escalation, and supply chain risk in focus.

mscagliola shows how to use GitHub Copilot skills for spec-driven development, turning a Medallion Architecture blog post into a repeatable repo that generates Terraform for Azure platform setup and Databricks bundle files for workloads, while enforcing strict placeholder/TODO rules to avoid invented environment values.

Microsoft Developer recaps key themes from Azure Cosmos DB Conf 2026, focusing on what engineers are doing in production to scale reliably, keep costs under control, and support AI-driven workloads—especially vector search and modern search patterns built into Cosmos DB.

John Savill breaks down practical ways to change an AI model’s behavior, from prompt and context techniques through to retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and fine-tuning approaches like LoRA.

Juan Montes reports on how Porsche Cup Brasil built an AI-assisted crash analysis and telemetry workflow on Microsoft platforms, cutting damage assessment time and improving race operations with human-in-the-loop validation.

David Ortinau and Gerald Versluis are joined by Nick Kovalsky to demo .NET MAUI work that combines Rust, SkiaSharp, and a drawn-UI approach, plus AI/ML live processing techniques he’s been building.

Aaron Merrill announces the general availability of OneLake security in Microsoft Fabric, outlining the default enablement rollout, UI improvements for role management, safer RLS authoring with inline validation, and new APIs for managing roles and securing mirrored data across engines.

Gaurav Mittal explains how to validate GitHub Copilot Coding Agent runs in CI when agent behavior is non-deterministic, by building an independent “trust layer” that checks essential outcomes instead of brittle step-by-step scripts.

Avinanda Chattapadday introduces High Concurrency (HC) sessions for the Microsoft Fabric Livy API, enabling parallel Spark execution with session reuse, isolated REPLs, built-in monitoring, and better resource efficiency for automated pipelines and job orchestration.

Michael Bruhjell introduces a preview feature in Microsoft Fabric’s monitoring hub that centralizes failure notification management for scheduled items, making it easier to view which jobs have notifications configured and to add, edit, or remove email recipients across many items and workspaces.

Miquella de Boer announces general availability of a native OneLake catalog experience inside Azure AI Foundry, letting teams browse governed Fabric/OneLake data in-context and turn it into knowledge sources for grounded AI workflows without manually wiring data sources.

pauledwards explains how to cut “model weight pre-flight” time on multi-node Azure GPU clusters by sharding downloads from Azure storage and broadcasting the remaining data over InfiniBand using MPI, with practical launch patterns for both Slurm and AKS.

KonstantinaF outlines a practical, phased disaster recovery strategy for Azure Databricks, focused on cross-region resilience for lakehouse workloads. The post explains RTO/RPO trade-offs, compares active-active vs warm standby patterns, and details how to replicate Unity Catalog metadata and Delta data using IaC, CI/CD, and repeatable DR pipelines.

Amit Damle and RK Iyer describe a “Discovery” utility for Azure Databricks that inventories workspace assets into Unity Catalog-backed Delta tables and a Lakeview dashboard, helping platform teams quickly understand clusters, jobs, warehouses, pipelines, security settings, and DBU usage.

Pankaj Arora announces general availability updates to Microsoft Fabric’s capacity observability tooling, including a new health page, timepoint summary and detail views for pinpointing compute usage, and the Fabric Chargeback app for allocating capacity costs back to workspaces or departments.

Leo Li announces the April 2026 on-premises data gateway release (version 3000.314), highlighting a generally available admin-triggered auto-update feature that lets gateway admins control when updates are applied to better fit maintenance windows and compliance needs.

Nadav Schachter introduces the OneLake Catalog Search API (Preview) for Microsoft Fabric, plus built-in support in the Fabric Core MCP Server and a new Fabric CLI find command, so teams can discover Fabric items across workspaces programmatically for scripts, internal tools, and agentic workflows.

Twinkle Cyril announces preview support for ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse, enabling metadata-only schema evolution (like widening numeric precision or expanding string lengths) without rebuilding tables or rewriting underlying Parquet/Delta data files.

Miguel Escobar introduces the My queries (Preview) feature in Microsoft Fabric Dataflow Gen2, which lets you save Power Query M queries into a personal library and import them into other dataflows to reuse common transformations and standardize data prep work.

Justin Barry explains how Direct Lake on SQL works with Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse, and what to optimize so Power BI semantic models stay fast and avoid falling back to DirectQuery.

This week’s roundup is about turning agentic tooling into something teams can run, budget, and govern. GitHub Copilot’s shift to token-based billing and AI Credits makes cost a first-class part of rollout checklists, especially as agent-style IDE and PR workflows expand and code review begins consuming both AI Credits and GitHub Actions minutes. On the platform side, GPT-5.5 in Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0, and A2A/MCP interoperability point toward more standardized agent runtimes, while Azure and Fabric updates reinforce the same operational theme: tighter identity, clearer observability, and more precise controls in both connected and constrained environments.

sameeraman explains how Microsoft Discovery can automate a scientific simulation workflow using a coordinated set of AI agents, reducing manual scripting and job monitoring while keeping scientific decision-making with researchers.

Marisa Mathews rounds up April 2026 community picks from Microsoft MVPs and Fabric Super Users, linking to deep dives on Fabric Warehousing, Power BI/DAX performance, SQL Server 2025 mirroring, ingestion/orchestration choices, metadata-driven integration frameworks, governance features, and real-time dashboards built with Eventstream, Eventhouse, and KQL.