Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse sub-item metadata in Microsoft Purview

Working at the intersection of data security, engineering, and governance, the Microsoft Purview product team continually explores capabilities that reshape how organizations understand and manage their data estate. One such capability—the ability to scan and extract metadata from Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse—has generated genuine excitement and strong customer demand. We are pleased to announce the GA of Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse sub‑item metadata in Microsoft Purview.

The Problem It Solves

Anyone who has managed a growing data estate knows the pain: data sources and workspaces multiply, Lakehouse accumulate tables and files, and before long nobody has a clear, centralized picture of what data lives where, what it looks like, or how it flows. Data governance becomes a spreadsheet exercise. Audits become stressful. Trust in data erodes.

Microsoft Purview directly addresses this by automatically scanning your Fabric tenant and bringing metadata into the Unified Catalog — without requiring your data teams to manually document anything.

What Purview Actually Extracts

Here is where it gets interesting from a product perspective. The integration distinguishes between two levels of metadata:

Item-level metadata and lineage covers the top-level workspace artifacts — the Lakehouse, Warehouses, Notebooks, Pipelines etc. Each of these is treated as a single entity in Purview, inventoried automatically after a scan completes.

Sub-item level metadata — and this is the exciting part — now extends into the Lakehouse itself. Purview can now scan tables (Delta format) and files within a Lakehouse, surfacing column-level detail, data types, and structural information directly in the Unified Catalog. For a data steward or data consumer, this is the difference between knowing "a Lakehouse called Sales Gold exists" and knowing "that Lakehouse contains a Delta table called fact orders with 14 columns including order date (date) and revenue (decimal)."

That distinction matters enormously for data discoverability, data contracts, and onboarding new consumers onto your data products.

Setting It Up — Simpler Than You Think

Connecting Purview to your Fabric tenant in the same Microsoft Entra tenancy is refreshingly straightforward. At a high level, the steps are:

1. Register your Fabric tenant as a data source in the Purview Data Map.
2. Create a security group in Microsoft Entra ID, add your Purview Managed Identity (MSI) or service principal to it, and grant that group read-only Admin API access in the Fabric tenant admin portal.
3. Enable the "Enhance admin APIs responses with detailed metadata" setting in the Fabric Admin portal. This is easy to miss but critical — without it, sub-item scanning won't function correctly.
4. Configure and schedule your scan, scoping it to all workspaces or a targeted subset.

Support for Managed Identity authentication is now available, which simplifies credential management for teams already invested in Azure's identity infrastructure. One practical note: if you are running multiple Fabric or Power BI scans simultaneously, you may encounter rate limiting. The recommended approach is to stagger scans across different time windows rather than running them in parallel.

What You Can Do With It

Once scanned, the metadata surfaces in Purview's Unified Catalog, where your teams can browse by source type, workspace, or Fabric experience, and search for specific assets by name, description, or other attributes. This makes it genuinely easy for data consumers to find and evaluate data before requesting access!

From a governance standpoint, this unlocks several capabilities that matter to modern data teams:

Data discoverability — analysts and data scientists can find Lakehouse tables in the catalog without relying on tribal knowledge or chasing down the engineer who built the pipeline six months ago.

Are you ready to setup Microsoft Fabric scan in Microsoft Purview? Head over to the Microsoft Purview Portal and select Data Map. Learn more in the Register Microsoft Fabric in Microsoft Purview documentation.