Tabular Editor 3 August 2023 Release

Key takeaways

• Preliminary Direct Lake support arrives: You can import tables and update table schemas on existing Direct Lake datasets through the Import Table Wizard, using your Fabric Lakehouse SQL endpoint.
• A C# preprocessor tells scripts which version they're in: Handy when you write one script for both Tabular Editor 2 and 3, where the C# compiles a little differently.
• AMO/TOM now does Binary XML: The updated library brings the XMLA performance gains Microsoft announced, so browsing data is faster.
• Small quality-of-life tweaks: Duplicated objects get a -Copy suffix, auto-backups use the .pbix name instead of a GUID, and the TMDL library is updated.

This summary is produced by the author, and not by AI.

Introduction

It is August and it’s time for a new version of Tabular Editor 3. Summer is heading into its waning days and even though the plan was to make minor improvements and fix bugs in this release, we couldn’t help ourselves and had to get a new feature in: Support for Direct Lake datasets.

If you just can’t wait, do head on over to downloads to get the release.

New features

The main addition this month is preliminary support for Microsoft Fabric Direct Lake mode.

Preliminary support for Microsoft Fabric Direct Lake mode

Tabular Editor now supports adding tables to Direct Lake datasets through the Import Table Wizard. Moreover, you can update the schema of existing tables through the usual right-click. Tabular Editor utilizes the SQL endpoint of your Fabric Lakehouse to obtain the table schemas. Watch the video below for a quick tutorial and read our blog article dedicated to Direct Lake datasets.

Direct Lake datasets edited in Tabular Editor 3

C# preprocessor

A new functionality within C# scripting that determines the version of Tabular Editor is available. This is quite useful when creating scripts for both Tabular Editor 2 and 3 as there can be small differences between how the C# script is compiled in each.
For more information and a code example of the preprocessor directive please see our documentation.

Improvements

We’ve made a few minor improvements as well in the August release.

AMO/TOM support for Binary XML

Microsoft recently announced that the AMO/TOM client library now supports Binary XML, promising great performance improvements for 3rd party tools (such as Tabular Editor). So naturally, we’ve made sure that Tabular Editor 3 now uses the latest version of AMO/TOM.

-Copy instead of Copy

A small but impactful change is that when duplicating objects, the new object name will be suffixed with -Copy. This is done to ensure that trailing spaces are less likely to occur when batch renaming objects after having duplicated them.

.bim auto backup

The automatic backup feature has gotten a tweak so that the name of the .pbix file is used in the .bim file name instead of a GUID.

TMDL update

With the latest version of AMO/TOM, the newest TMDL library is now also applied in Tabular Editor 3.

Other improvements

• Table data performance
• Autocomplete auto adjust

Bug fixes

We have made multiple bug fixes in 3.10.0; please see our release notes for full details.

If you have any feedback or experience any bugs please reach out in our community forum. We look forward to hearing from you!

For further reading

• Direct Lake Datasets: How to use them with Tabular Editor (Tabular Editor). Covers editing Direct Lake datasets in Tabular Editor, the companion to this release's preliminary Direct Lake support.
• What's new with Direct Lake in August 2025 (Tabular Editor). Covers how far Direct Lake support has progressed two years after this preliminary release.
• Direct Lake overview (Microsoft Learn). Microsoft's reference on Direct Lake, including the XMLA and web-modelling limitation noted here.

In conclusion

That's the August 2023 release: the headline is preliminary Direct Lake support, plus a C# preprocessor, Binary XML performance, and a handful of smaller touches. Grab 3.10.0, and let us know how Direct Lake editing works out for you. More on that to come.