I got a lot of messages asking how to get started. I figured I’d answer them once with some guidance. So this article walks you through the steps to clear before you create your first Fabric Plan item.
It walks through all seven, with extra attention where you should slow down.
Step 1: Confirm Fabric Plan is available in your region
You need to make sure your region is supported. The list is here:
· https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/iq/plan/overview-regions
If it is supported, move to the next step. If not, here is a workaround, with a warning attached.
Fabric will let you change capacity later. It will not let you change the region of a workspace once it has Fabric items that cannot move across regions. The region you pick at workspace creation is grounded to that workspace for its lifetime. If your region is not supported, you have two trial options: a Fabric trial in a supported region, or capacity temporarily bought in one. I’d only suggest going this route if you genuinely want to test Plan. The catch: treat this purely as a trial. You’ll rebuild from scratch when you move to production.
Regions are sticky. Capacity can change. Region cannot.
Step 2: Turn on the tenant setting (and pick who can create)
From the Fabric admin portal, you have to turn the Fabric Plan setting on. Plan is in preview, and there is a tenant setting that controls who can create Plan items. I expect this control to stay even after GA, because some organizations won’t want Plan available to everyone. When you turn it on, you can also scope who can create Plan items, so you don’t have to open it to the whole tenant.
Tenant-wide enablement is the wrong default during preview, because every Plan item spins up its own infrastructure in whichever workspace it gets created. Letting any user create a Plan item anywhere is the same shape of mistake as letting any user provision an Azure SQL database without a sponsor. A reasonable group for an early pilot includes Fabric admins, the workspace admins for the workspaces hosting Plan items, the FP&A or finance solution owner, the data model owner, and whoever is participating in the workshop.
The Plan (preview) tenant setting in the Fabric Admin portal.
Step 3: Two workspaces, separate the app from the data
Technically you can skip this and create the Plan item now. From experience, do not.
Use two workspaces.
A Plan workspace and a separate data workspace.
The first is the Plan workspace. It holds the Plan item itself.
The second is the data workspace. It holds the Fabric SQL database where your writeback data lives.
The primary reason: end users should not have direct access to the application database, the same way they should not have a SQL login to the ERP database. Separate the app from the data.
You can put everything in one workspace for a demo. Do not do it in production.
Step 4: The Fabric SQL database
Inside the data workspace, create the Fabric SQL database. More on Microsoft Learn. The path is Databases, then New, then SQL database. Provide a name (something simple like Fabric SQL is fine for the first run) and select Create. To create the Fabric SQL database, you need Member or Admin role in the data workspace.
Creating the Fabric SQL database from the data workspace.
Step 5: Connection to the SQL database
Fabric Plan is an application. Like any application talking to a database, it needs a connection, even when the database lives inside Fabric.
Open Settings, then Manage connections and gateways, then New, then Cloud. Choose SQL database in Fabric as the connection type. Set authentication to OAuth 2.0. Sign in. Select Create.
A Fabric cloud connection is not a connection to a specific server. It is a connection to every Fabric SQL database the creator has access to.
Anyone you share the connection with inherits that reach. Pick the creator account deliberately.
Manage connections and gateways: a cloud connection to SQL database in Fabric, OAuth 2.0.
Step 6: Creating the Plan item
The Plan item itself is the easy part. Inside the Plan workspace, choose New item, then under Develop Data, pick Plan (preview). Name it.
New item, then under Develop data, then Plan (preview).
The Plan item creation automatically provisions the app database in the same workspace. That auto-created database stores Plan metadata. It is not the data database we created in Step 4 -- keep them separate. From this point on, everything else (PowerTable sheets, Planning sheets, Intelligence sheets) happens inside the Plan item.
Step 7: Point the Plan item to the connection
We already created the connection in Step 5. Now we point the Plan item to it.
Pointing the Plan item to the cloud connection.
Ready for Takeoff
Now you don’t have any excuses😅.
Go ahead and create your first Fabric Plan item, and break a few things on purpose. That is the fastest way to learn.
