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. Understanding these concepts first makes the rest of the command & tool reference easier to follow.

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.

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.

Name-or-GUID resolution¶