Is Fabric "flakey"? · Learn Microsoft Fabric

Sep 27 in General

Is Fabric "flakey"?

Sorry this is a bit long.

Does anyone else find that Fabric is a little less stable than you would expect? I've been working with Fabric for the past few months. I see it as the ideal tool to answer our data extraction and reporting needs.

Initially I was using a trial capacity as a proof of concept. There were a few issues there that I put down to the fact that I was using trial and not paid for capacity. The proof of concept passed and I bought some F2 capacity. We are small and will not be putting much load on the platform after I get everything set up.

The first thing I noted on moving from trial capacity is that there is no way to bundle everything you've done and bring it to another workspace. I put this down to Fabric not being a fully finished product, which it clearly is not. Bummer. So I recreated everything again on my development workspace. Took me a week.

There were existing reports in this workspace published directly from Power BI Desktop. When I overburdened the F2 capacity of this workspace, these wouldn't run either, even though the contained no "Fabric" specific elements. So bad idea to mix Fabric and non-Fabric elements in the one workspace.

I created another workspace solely for Fabric development. Another move. But this time I had the deployment pipeline. That should make things easier. No. It doesn't move Gen 2 Dataflows. It moves data pipelines but leaves dataflow steps pointing at the dataflows in the previous workspace. To correct this is as much work as to create them new. Once I had everything moved I deleted everything from the Power BI workspace that had anything to do with Fabric, so that I could remove the Fabric capacity from it. However, one dataflow was left in "publishing" mode. For 5 days. Never moved to refreshing mode. I eventually had to raise a support ticket and delete the thing using an API call.

Onto my current F2 development environment. I started running into performance issues immediately. I downloaded the Fabric Metrics App. Apart from not understanding any of the graphs, it only shows what happened up to midnight on the previous day. I need something that shows me what's eating all my capacity now and allows me stop or pause it if I need something else to run. And it needs to be easy to understand.

A day later I started getting errors that were caused by some "external fault". No more details. These miraculously disappeared after 2 days. It was stable for another few days. Now I'm getting an error (for the last 2 days) stating it "Failed to commit the metadata change". I found 1 answer when I googled the phrase that says the issue was fixed in April 2021. Maybe it's taking it's time to propagate to this part of the world.

There have been numerous issues that lasted an hour or two that I won't mention.

Overall, there seems to be one issue after another with Fabric. At F2 capacity I don't expect blistering performance, however I don't expect instability either. Maybe I'm doing something wrong and maybe my knowledge of Fabric isn't where it should be but I am fast losing faith in the product.

Does anyone else feel this way?

Fergus

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