Connections and credentials

Fabric database connections

Fabric Warehouse and Fabric Lakehouse connections don’t use a server address or password. You browse your Microsoft Fabric tenant and pick the warehouse or lakehouse, and Kenseme reaches it through your organization’s Fabric credential each time it needs to.

In the app: Settings › Organization Settings › External Credentials › Database Connections › Add Connection

Before you start

  • You need the Admin role in the organization.
  • Your organization needs a Fabric credential. Without one there is nothing to browse. See Fabric credentials.
  • The credential’s service principal needs access to the workspace that holds the warehouse or lakehouse (Member or Admin on the workspace).

Add a Fabric connection

  1. On the Database Connections page, open the Add Connection menu and choose Add Fabric Warehouse Connection or Add Fabric Lakehouse Connection.
  2. Enter a Name and, if you like, a Description (optional).
  3. Click Browse Fabric… to open the Fabric explorer.
  4. At the top of the explorer, choose the credential under Fabric environment:.
  5. Open a workspace and select the warehouse or lakehouse. The explorer only offers items of the type you’re adding.
  6. Confirm your pick. The dialog shows a card with the item name and its workspace. Use Change… if you picked the wrong one.
  7. Click Test Connection, then Create.
[screenshot]
The Add Fabric Lakehouse Connection dialog after picking an item, showing the item and its workspace.

What gets stored

A Fabric connection stores the coordinates of the item you picked (its workspace and item) and which Fabric credential to use. There’s no connection string and no password. When Kenseme needs to read the warehouse or lakehouse, it signs in with the Fabric credential at that moment.

That has three practical effects:

  • There’s nothing to rotate on the connection itself. If the credential’s secret changes, update the Fabric credential instead.
  • The connection depends on the credential. Kenseme won’t let you delete a Fabric credential while a connection still uses it.
  • Deleting the connection changes nothing in Fabric. The confirmation says so: only Kenseme stops using the item.

Re-point a Fabric connection

  1. Click Edit on the connection’s row.
  2. Under Fabric target, click Change target…. The explorer opens on the workspace the connection already uses.
  3. Pick the new item. The dialog shows the new target with the old one underneath (was: …). Click Reset to go back to the original.
  4. Click Save Changes.

The system is fixed once a connection exists, so a warehouse connection can only point at another warehouse, and a lakehouse connection at another lakehouse.

Warning: Re-pointing flags every binding environment that uses the connection for a schema refresh. Their captured tables and columns describe the old item, so they have to be re-read from the new one. Suggestions stay disabled on those environments until you run Refresh schema.

Keys on Fabric Lakehouse

A lakehouse is read through its SQL analytics endpoint, which is read-only. Fabric doesn’t enforce primary or foreign keys, but Kenseme does read any keys you have declared on lakehouse tables as informational constraints. Where none are declared, relationship suggestions rely on matching table and column names, so expect to review them where names aren’t consistent.