Solution – Using Logical Names for DW in Fabric

Currently the Fabric TSQL end point for a workspace is seen like server and you can connect to it via SSMS or other. The big problem is the connection is made using the GUID of the workspace and Tennant, which makes it almost impossible to know if you are connecting to PRD or DEV.

For example – in the post below is your SSMS view of four SQL End points in Fabric. One is dev and one is critical production. Your dev lead tells you to drop table Students in dev as its blocking tests. Which one do you pick ?

Long term we really need Fabric to support custom dns names like we have with synapse so we can connect to the end point using our workspace name like:

• fabricdw-dev.prodata.ie.dw.fabric.microsoft.com
• fabricdw-prd.prodata.ie.dw.fabric.microsoft.com

This feature is not available, but please do you can vote on it here:
https://ideas.fabric.microsoft.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=c21f8b1f-137e-ee11-a81c-00224854aa33

Why is this so important ? Its just a name. Who cares.

The reason this is so important is one of the huge risks of developers having access to production is accidental deployments, or making changes to one environment thinking it is another. This would be in the top 10 list of production outrages and one way to mitigate this is to clearly tell developers what they are connecting to without them having to “guess” or know a difference in a guid.

Obviously there are best practices such as not giving developers access to production, but the ability to do this does very much depend on company and team size, operational and devops maturity.

Registered Servers in SSMS to the rescue

To the rescue (and credit to @EoingTheForge on twitter), you can setup registered servers in SSMS and then connect to a Fabric instance by using the workspace name like below.

This allows for clear identification of a server by a logical name such as the workspace and as long as you always connect via registered servers and not the normal connect window you now get this much better experience