Power Query dataflows like to use GUIDs to reference workspaces, lakehouses and warehouses. With a GUID reference,  you are authoritatively referencing a specific resource, which is good…but working with GUIDs can entail complications, both for humans and CI/CD, which is not so good.

I know what lakehouse “SomeLakehouse” is, but I’ll have to look up what lakehouse “fb7322d6-781e-4e0a-97b1-1eec69a5547b” is. On the source control side, I find that, due to how GUIDs tend to be intermixed with other code in Power Query, Git often incorrectly wants to merge dev workspace GUIDs to test, or test-specific GUIDs to prod. If not caught by careful human PR/merge review, such inadvertent merges leads to bad things happening.

Can we use names instead of GUIDs? That would resolve at least part of the challenge. Our code could refer to “SomeLakehouse” instead of a GUID (nice!).

However, switching from GUIDs to names still leaves the need to update workspace references when a dataflow is promoted across workspaces (e.g. from dev -> test -> prod.) Is there a way to reference the current workspace, regardless of its name?

The answer is yes to both! Using names instead of GUIDs isn’t new, but hasn’t often been done. On the other hand, relative workspace references is a brand-new, in preview feature.

Let’s explore both, in code!

Continue reading →