Start a Run
Owners and Contributors can start Runs; Readers cannot. Starting a Run requires an active trial or subscription and a configured Environment. A Run that is already in progress when access expires still finishes and records its Result. The job runs under your own Microsoft identity, so you need read access to the source and target Tables and write access to the Results Lakehouse in the dedicated workspace. To run one Table Pair:- Open Table Pairs.
- Open the Table Pair.
- Click Run validation.
Run status
Runs, Table Pairs, and Tests show the same status badges. The text label is always visible alongside the color.
Each Test is evaluated independently, so one Test’s error does not stop the
others. If the job cannot read a source or target Table, every Test in the Run
reports an error. Fabric, not General Validation, decides when the job runs.
While a Run is in progress its page refreshes on its own, no more than once a
minute, and you can leave the page and return later.
A Run whose Tests fail also shows as failed in Fabric monitoring. Open the Run
in General Validation to see whether a Test failed or the execution itself had
a problem. The Run page also shows a notice when Fabric rejected the
submission or could not finish the job. In those cases open the job in Fabric
for its details, because General Validation records only a fixed reason code
and never Fabric’s message.
Results
Results lists Runs newest first, including Runs of archived Table Pairs, with each Run, its Table Pair, when it started, its status, its Test count, and how many Tests passed, failed, or errored. Refresh Runs reloads the list. Results contains no action to start a Run. Each Run has its own link, shown as the first eight characters of its Run ID, that you can bookmark or reload. Opening a Run shows its overall status and, for each Test, its verdict, the number of comparisons, rows, or values compared, the mismatch count, and a reason. Most reasons state whether the compared values, rows, or sets agreed. The following reasons need more explanation.
Refresh Result asks Fabric for the job’s status and imports the latest
summary: verdicts, counts, and reason codes. When a summary is imported,
General Validation confirms that it belongs to the Run it was prepared for and
that it contains only verdicts, counts, and reason codes. Results reflect what
the job in your workspace wrote; they are validated for consistency, not
independently attested. A Reader can refresh and read a Run, but only an Owner
or Contributor records the imported summary in General Validation.
If a submission is interrupted before the job ID is recorded, the Run shows
that Fabric may have started it. Click Refresh Result first. If the job
exists in Fabric, an Owner or Contributor expands Recover a submitted Run,
pastes its ID into Existing Fabric job ID, and clicks Attach existing
job. This records the existing job; it does not submit another Run. General
Validation never retries a submission on its own, and a new attempt always
requires a new Run.
View details
Click View details on a Test to see its exact aggregate values, shown as Source value and Target value, or a sample of up to 100 mismatched rows. Your browser reads these directly from OneLake with your own Microsoft identity. They are shown only while the details view is open: Close details or leaving the Run clears them from the page. They are never sent to General Validation. To open details you need access to the dedicated General Validation workspace in Fabric. Membership in your General Validation Organization does not grant that access; a Fabric workspace administrator shares the workspace with teammates who need it. If the page asks for OneLake consent, click Allow OneLake access and then Retry details. The row sample is evidence for investigation, not an export. The mismatch count in the Results table is the exact total even when the sample is smaller or evidence capture was turned off for the Test. If an artifact cannot be previewed in the browser, the panel links to Open results Lakehouse in Fabric so you can inspect the Run’s folder there.Where artifacts live
Every Run writes its outputs to the Results Lakehouse, named GeneralValidationResults, in your dedicated workspace underFiles/GeneralValidation/results, in a folder named with the Run ID. The
folder holds a summary, a details file with the exact values, and Parquet
mismatch evidence that you can query in Fabric with a notebook or the SQL
endpoint. Each Run also keeps the exact instructions it executed; you can
review them in the Run’s folder or in Fabric’s Spark monitoring. View in
Fabric on a Run opens the workspace.
You own these files and control their retention. General Validation never
deletes them on its own; there is no automatic cleanup, and product updates and
Reinstall on Environment leave them in place. Remove on
Environment deletes the dedicated workspace and everything inside it,
including the Results Lakehouse, Results, and row evidence, and affects any
job still running there. After removal, Run metadata remains in General
Validation, but exact values and evidence can no longer be previewed.