Rene Fürstenberg – World of Azure Cloud

How to Save Costs in Microsoft Fabric by Automating Capacity Start & Stop with Azure Logic Apps

Rene Fürstenberg — Sat, 16 May 2026 07:15:55 +0000

Introduction

I get asked quite often how to save costs efficiently in Microsoft Fabric. One of the biggest levers is pausing your Fabric capacity when it’s not in use.

What’s important to understand here: storage costs continue, even when the capacity is stopped. You’re only saving on compute. That’s still a huge win, especially if your workloads are not running 24/7.

In this article, I’ll walk through what this can look like in practice and how you can set up a proper solution to stop and start your capacity.

Let’s quickly look at the available options:

Manually start and stop the capacity
Automatically start and stop using a Logic App
Automatically start and stop using Azure Automation
With Semantic Link Labs

Technically, all of these work. But let’s be honest, manually starting and stopping your capacity every day isn’t something anyone wants to deal with in the long run.

That’s why automation is the only approach that really makes sense.

In my case, I decided to go with Azure Logic Apps, and I’ll show you how to set this up step by step. It’s lightweight, reliable, and easy to maintain, exactly what you want for something that should just run in the background without any manual effort.

Let’s get into it.

Materialized Lake Views in Microsoft Fabric

Rene Fürstenberg — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 15:24:05 +0000

Introduction

In this article, i want to focus specifically on Materialized Lake Views (MLVs in order to better understand how they work and where they can be applied.

MLVs are still relatively new in Microsoft Fabric and, at first glance, do not fully align with what Microsoft has strongly promoted so far, namely a strict separation of the individual layers. Nevertheless, they represent a very interesting alternative, especially when it comes to reducing complex ETL processes.

In my projects, I generally follow the Medallion architecture, where I use a separate Lakehouse for each of the Bronze, Silver, and Gold layers. Alternatively, the Gold layer can also be implemented as a Fabric Warehouse.

This is exactly where Materialized Lake Views come into play, as they enable a different approach:

Instead of operating multiple Lakehouses for the individual layers, Bronze, Silver, and Gold can be represented via separate schemas within a single Lakehouse. The individual layers are logically separated while being technically created within the same Lakehouse.

SAP Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric with SAP Datasphere Step by Step Guide

Rene Fürstenberg — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 08:57:28 +0000

Introduction

In this article, I walk through the complete process of replicating data from an SAP S/4HANA system into Microsoft Fabric. The goal was to build an end-to-end setup that connects the SAP landscape with modern analytics capabilities in Fabric. To achieve this, I combined several components from both SAP and Microsoft: the SAP Cloud Connector, SAP Datasphere, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, and finally the Mirrored SAP Database item inside Microsoft Fabric.

The article is based on the exact steps I carried out in my own environment. Along the way, I encountered a few challenges on the SAP side, especially when configuring the connection through the SAP Cloud Connector. Once this part was working, the remaining setup in Microsoft Fabric was straightforward. In the end, the result is a working replication pipeline that allows SAP data to be used directly in Fabric and prepared for further analytics scenarios.