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Concepts

The sections below describe cross-cutting concepts that apply to all fdw/fabric-dw commands: how the CLI distinguishes between item kinds, which global flags are available on every invocation, and how the target workspace is resolved.

Item targets: Data Warehouse vs SQL Analytics Endpoint

Fabric has two SQL-surface item kinds:

  • Data Warehouse: read-write, supports full DDL (CREATE/DROP/TRUNCATE TABLE, CREATE/DROP SCHEMA, CREATE/ALTER VIEW, etc.).
  • SQL Analytics Endpoint: read-only SQL surface auto-generated over a Lakehouse. DDL and mutating operations are not supported; only read/query operations are allowed.

Each command below is labelled with one of:

  • Targets: Data Warehouse / SQL Analytics Endpoint: the command works on both item kinds.
  • Targets: Data Warehouse only: the command is blocked on SQL Analytics Endpoints (either by an explicit client-side guard in the source code, because it requires write/DDL capability that endpoints do not have, or because it calls warehouse-scoped REST API paths that are not available for SQL Analytics Endpoints).
  • Targets: SQL Analytics Endpoint: the command operates on SQL Analytics Endpoints specifically (not on Data Warehouses).
  • Targets: Workspace (not item-specific): the command operates at the workspace level and does not target a specific DW or SQL Analytics Endpoint item.

Global options

These options are placed immediately after fabric-dw (or fdw), before the command group.

Flag Description Default
-V / --version Print the installed fabric-dw version and exit. -
-w / --workspace TEXT Target workspace (name or GUID). Overrides the FABRIC_DW_DEFAULT_WORKSPACE environment variable and the configured default. See Selecting a workspace. -
--json Emit machine-readable JSON instead of Rich tables. off
--auth {default\|sp\|interactive} Override FABRIC_AUTH for this invocation. default
-y / --yes Skip confirmation prompts on destructive commands. off
-v / --verbose Enable DEBUG-level logging. INFO

The --auth flag and the FABRIC_AUTH environment variable accept the same three values. See Authentication for the full credential chain.

Selecting a workspace

Every command that operates on a workspace (everything except workspaces list and cache clear) resolves the target workspace from the following sources, in priority order:

  1. -w / --workspace flag: explicit value passed on the root command, e.g. fdw -w MyWorkspace warehouses list.
  2. FABRIC_DW_DEFAULT_WORKSPACE environment variable: if the flag is absent, the CLI reads this variable.
  3. Configured default: set with fdw config set workspace VALUE; used when neither the flag nor the environment variable is present.
  4. Error: if none of the above is set, the CLI prints a helpful message suggesting you set one of the above.

The workspaces command group is an exception: workspaces get and workspaces set-collation take the workspace as an explicit positional argument (not via -w), and workspaces list takes no workspace at all.

-A / --all-workspaces interaction

Passing -A on the two list commands that support it (warehouses list, sql-endpoints list) explicitly scans every visible workspace. This flag is mutually exclusive with -w (an explicit -w conflicts with scanning all workspaces), but it does not conflict with a configured default workspace or FABRIC_DW_DEFAULT_WORKSPACE: the configured default is silently ignored when -A is used.

Name-or-GUID resolution

Name-or-GUID resolution

All workspace, warehouse, endpoint, and snapshot parameters - on both fdw/fabric-dw commands and the MCP tools - accept either the item's display name or its GUID. The resolver translates names to GUIDs automatically and caches the mapping locally. Use fdw cache clear (CLI) or the clear_cache MCP tool to force a fresh lookup after renaming items outside this tool.