Take over Ownership in Microsoft Fabric

When you create an item in Microsoft Fabric (a notebook, a lakehouse, a warehouse, a pipeline …), you are also the owner of the item. There has been an outstanding issue in Microsoft Fabric, where if a user’s account was deactivated, other users could no longer access the item. Whoopsies. When a consultant came in, created a proof-of-concept and then left, you cannot change their lakehouse for example. Not good. The annoying part was that it was not easy to change the ownership to another user. For the warehouse, you could use a REST API. However, for the lakehouse you needed to contact support and let them change it for you (after you’ve explained 50 times that no, you could not use that REST API because that works only for the warehouse).

After almost two years of Fabric, there’s now the option to easily change the ownership of an item. You go to the settings of the item and in the About tab, there will be an option to take over the ownership. You will only see this if someone else is the owner.

Of course, this only moves the problem around because right now you’re the new owner. What if you win the lottery and quit? That’s right, someone else has to take over ownership. But at least the project can move forward.

At the time, you cannot let a service principal take ownership, as documented in the limitations. So the ideal solution is not here yet, where you can use for example a REST API to set the owner to the workspace identity or a service principal, for any item type. An even better solution is to make sure that the owner of an item is not an actual user from the start, for example by creating items through REST APIs (if supported) instead of manually creating them.