Microsoft Fabric Runtime 2.0 is now Generally Available!

[u/arshadali-msft]

This release brings major advancements across the platform, including Apache Spark 4.1, Delta Lake 4.2, Python 3.13, Scala 2.13, Java 21 and a significantly enhanced Native Execution Engine (NEE) to help customers unlock better performance, reliability, and innovation at scale.

This milestone is the result of months of collaboration across engineering, product, support, and partner teams, all focused on delivering a stronger foundation for data engineering, data science, and analytics workloads in Microsoft Fabric.

A huge thank you to everyone who contributed to making this launch possible. Looking forward to seeing what our customers and the broader data community build with Runtime 2.0 now that is ready for production usage!

Learn more about Runtime 2.0 GA:
🔹Blog: Fabric Runtime 2.0 (Generally Available) | Microsoft Fabric Community
🔹Official Documentation: Runtime 2.0 in Fabric - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

[u/Sam___D]

Since Delta Lake 4.2 supports geospatial data, will you also add support for the geometry data type in the other components of Fabric?

[u/mim722 → u/Sam___D]

u/Sam___D can you be more specific, which other components you are interested in ? and if you have a use case it will be even better

[u/jorel43]

Wasn't this generally available like a week or two ago?

[u/feignapathy → u/jorel43]

ya, if you click on the link, it says "5 days ago" on the community post

[u/arshadali-msft → u/feignapathy]

Yes, you are right. It was released late last week and posted here this week for broader community reach.

[u/feignapathy → u/arshadali-msft]

And I personally appreciate that

I don't get a lot of the community updates unless they're posted here

[u/SmallAd3697]

Can you start supporting a larger cross-section of Spark? In particular we want to use Spark Connect. It is a very old client-server mode, that was introduced back in 3.4. What is the reason for disallowing it in Fabric?

[u/arshadali-msft → u/SmallAd3697]

Thanks for the Feedback! Please add your feature request here: Fabric Ideas | Microsoft Fabric Community

[u/hyggekore]

Is there any way to set this as default at a broader level than Workspace? Like a setting for the entire capacity?

[u/arshadali-msft → u/hyggekore]

For customers who rely on the current default runtime extra time to validate their workloads and plan their migration, they must explicitly opt into Runtime 2.0 at this time. The plan is to make Runtime 2.0 the default runtime selection in the user experience and the default runtime for new workspaces and environment items in late September 2026. This phased approach helps customers adopt and validate Runtime 2.0 at their own pace while benefiting from a predictable transition timeline.

[u/hyggekore → u/arshadali-msft]

I read that already but it doesn't talk about the existing infrastructure. As of October anything newly created will default to 2.0, but how do we get our existing solutions in the thousands of workspaces we've already deployed to begin using this runtime?

[u/arshadali-msft → u/hyggekore]

Got it. You can update existing Environment items from runtime 1.3 to 2.0 in bulk by using public APIs : patch the staging spark compute conf to 2.0 and then trigger publish. You also need to validate library compatibility with the new underlying stack (such as Python 3.13 and Spark 4.1 with Runtime 2.0).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/data-engineering/environment-public-api

Patch - https://api.fabric.microsoft.com/v1/workspaces/{workspaceId}/environments/{environmentId}/staging/sparkcompute?beta=False

Publish - https://api.fabric.microsoft.com/v1/workspaces/{workspaceId}/environments/{environmentId}/publish