Microsoft Fabric is a unified data platform that continues to transform businesses worldwide, with more than 19,000 organizations and 74% of Fortune 500 companies leveraging Fabric. At FabCon, customers from around the world will share how they are pushing the boundaries of data at scale and unlocking new possibilities for business innovation. 

The London Stock Exchange (LSEG), for example, is leveraging Fabric to unify their data estates and efficiently process their data:

“Microsoft Fabric has been pivotal in LSEG’s data platform modernization journey. With Fabric Spark as the core engine powering our customer facing enterprise data platform, LSEG manages large volumes of time critical financial markets data that require complex data quality and transformation rules, executed at scale and with consistent service levels. Combining this with the broader Fabric eco-system has opened up new and exciting customer experiences and AI-powered opportunities.” 

 —Phil Withey, Head of Architecture, LSEG Microsoft Partners

Similarly, International Workplace Group (IWG) is revolutionizing its approach to data integration: 

“Microsoft Fabric was a game changer because of its ability to create shortcuts without physically moving data from one place to another. Before, if I had to incorporate three sources, I had to create pipelines to bring in the data. That pipeline had a cost. The data movement had a cost. With Fabric, it’s two clicks and that’s it.” 

—José Viegas, Senior Data Architect, IWG 

We’re always listening and learning to further enable customer successes like these by delivering the latest innovations across the data estate. See how customers around the world are using Fabric to transform their teams and industries.

New capabilities coming to Microsoft Fabric 

Today, we’re enhancing the Fabric experience by unlocking new possibilities through key innovations designed to help strengthen security and harness the power of AI to streamline data workstreams like never before:

Introducing OneLake security—an industry breakthrough in data protection 

Managing granular data security across multiple applications and engines is complex, often resulting in excessive restrictions or accidental data exposures. That’s why we’re introducing OneLake security—an industry breakthrough in data protection. OneLake is Fabric’s unified data lake, which seamlessly connects your entire multi-cloud and on-premises data estate. All your teams get a single place to discover, explore, and manage their data—even within apps like Microsoft Teams and Excel. 

Now with OneLake security, you can define access permissions once, and Fabric will enforce it consistently across all engines. Data owners can create security roles, refine permissions, and control access at the row and column levels to securely share data. For example, you can grant access to only certain folders, tables, or even rows in a lakehouse—restricting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) while keeping other data available. This security propagates automatically, so whether you query the data in SQL or visualize it in a Power BI report, you can only see what has been authorized. Check out the following demo to see OneLake security in action:

We are thrilled to share that OneLake security will be available in preview within a few months. In the meantime, if you are interested in trying OneLake security on your workspaces and providing feedback, please visit this early access sign-up page.

• Read more in the OneLake security blog. 

Empowering agentic AI by integrating Fabric data agents with Azure AI Foundry

Data plays a critical role in agentic AI, enabling AI agents to operate independently, make informed decisions, and take meaningful actions. That’s why we are expanding capabilities and deepening integrations between our data and AI platforms. 

Data agents (formerly known as AI skills) in Microsoft Fabric are AI-powered assistants that can learn, adapt, and deliver insights instantly, helping teams make better data-driven decisions. Fabric data agents not only retrieve data from OneLake, but they can reason over and understand the data—what it means, how it’s structured, and when it’s relevant. 

Starting today, organizations can use Azure AI Foundry to connect customized, conversational agents, created in Fabric. AI developers can now use Azure AI Agent Service to securely ground AI agent outputs with enterprise knowledge in Fabric data agents, so that responses are accurate, relevant, and contextually aware. By combining Fabric’s sophisticated data analysis over enterprise data with Azure AI Foundry’s cutting-edge GenAI technology, businesses can create custom conversational AI agents leveraging domain expertise. 

“Fabric data agents are a powerful and value-adding tool in data environments. Acting as a conversational capability layer, we can use data agents to ‘talk’ to our data, understand it, and derive different insights in support of our daily decision making.”

—Maureen Tan, Head of AI Center of Expertise, NTT DATA

• Learn how NTT DATA is simplifying their AI deployment.
• Read more about Fabric data agent integration in the Fabric blog and Azure AI blog.
• Check out the following demo to learn more:

Copilot and AI capabilities in Fabric will be available for all SKUs

We are excited to announce that Copilot and AI capabilities will be enabled for all paid SKUs in Fabric, making these tools accessible to everyone within the coming weeks. This expansion is driven by your feedback about the impact Copilot in Microsoft Fabric has had on your productivity, and how broadening access to Copilot would benefit more teams. With this latest update, customers on F2 and above can use Copilot and AI capabilities, such as Fabric data agents, to streamline workflows, generate insights, and drive impactful decisions.

• Read more about these changes in the Copilot for Fabric SKU update blog. 

Seamlessly migrate your data to Fabric 

We are excited to announce the preview of a migration experience natively built into the Fabric UI, enabling Azure Synapse Analytics (data warehouse) customers to transition seamlessly to Microsoft Fabric. With a built-in, intelligent assessment, guided support, and AI-powered assistance, this experience simplifies migration of code and data while helping customers unlock Fabric’s unified data foundation, AI-driven analytics, and enhanced performance—without the complexity of traditional migrations. 

• Read more in the Migration Assistant for Fabric Data Warehouse blog. 

Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

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Additional Fabric innovations

In addition to the above, we are introducing a series of updates across the Microsoft Fabric platform and its workloads. These advancements will further progress our commitments to our four core Fabric pillars: 

Fabric is a complete AI-powered data platform

Fabric is a unified, AI-powered data platform that fosters seamless collaboration across your organization. Today, we’re sharing new enhancements and capabilities that will further strengthen the Fabric platform and workloads, which will unlock even more possibilities for your data initiatives. 

Platform enhancements: 

• The preview of Command Line Interface (CLI) in Fabric introduces a new terminal that allows users and admins to execute commands across Fabric using interactive prompts or scripts, enabling a seamless, code-first experience without relying on clicks. 

• The preview of new CI/CD enhancements expands support across the Fabric platform, including variable libraries for workspaces, Service Principal support for GitHub, and Deployment Pipelines Fabric APIs Phase II. 

• The preview of User Data Functions introduces a way for developers to implement and reuse custom business logic in Fabric data science and data engineering workflows, streamlining development and improving efficiency. 

• The general availability of the Terraform provider for Fabric, to help customers ensure deployments and management tasks are executed accurately and consistently. 

• The general availability of Tags, which allows users to optimally describe items they own, and help enhance organization and discoverability of data in Fabric. 

Data integration enhancements: 

• Several enhancements to Dataflow Gen2 including the general availability of Incremental Refresh, and the preview to save a Dataflow Gen1 as a Dataflow Gen2. 

• Database Mirroring has been enhanced with key new enterprise capabilities, including a new source (Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server) and support for connecting to data sources over the On-premises and Virtual Network Data Gateways. 

• The general availability of Apache Airflow job empowers customers to run their Apache Airflow DAGs in Microsoft Fabric, with a serverless Apache Airflow runtime. 

• The general availability of the Copy job introduces a new simplified experience for customers who need to move data between different data sources and destinations. It also introduces support for batch and incremental data movement. 

• The preview of key orchestration enhancements is now available, enabling the creation of metadata-driven pipelines that orchestrate Dataflow Gen2 (CI/CD) parameterized invocation from Data Pipelines 

• Read more about all the Data Factory enhancements in the What’s new with Fabric Data Factory.

Real-time intelligence enhancements:

• The general availability of Azure and Fabric Events transforms Fabric into an event-driven platform. Users can leverage the Real-Time hub to discover and subscribe to Azure and Fabric Events across OneLake, Fabric jobs, Workspaces, and Azure Blob Storage.

• The preview of new eventstream connectors which allows users to bring in data from additional non-Microsoft sources, including Weather, Solace PubSub+, ADX Table Streamify, MQTT v5, Event Grid Namespaces, and Confluent with Schema Registry. 

• Read more about our Real Time Intelligence enhancements in the Real Time Updates blog.

Data Engineering and Data Science enhancements: 

• The preview of Autoscale Billing for Spark helps optimize Spark job costs by offloading Data Engineering workloads to a serverless billing mode. Capacity admins can set a max capacity units (CUs) limit in capacity settings, ensuring Spark jobs use dedicated CUs instead of shared Fabric Capacity. 

• A new Copilot experience in Fabric notebooks that improves productivity with in-cell interactions, better code generation, and seamless Fabric integration. 

• The preview of AI functions provides powerful capabilities to apply LLM-powered transformations, such as summarization, classification, and text generation to your OneLake data—all with a single line of code.

Partner/ISV integrations 

• At Ignite, we announced the general availability of the Workload Development Toolkit (WDK) and introduced ISV workloads that bring new capabilities and value to our joint customers. We are excited to now announce the general availability of Fabric workloads from Osmos, Profisee, and PowerBI.tips, along with public previews of new workloads from Celonis, CluedIn, Neo4j, Lumel, Statsig, and Striim in the Fabric Workload Hub. In addition, CluedIn also announced a public preview of its integration with Open Mirroring in Fabric.

Fabric is open with an AI-ready data lake 

In addition to OneLake Security, we are also making enhancements to OneLake, including: 

• A modern get-data experience with OneLake catalog integration in Microsoft Excel (in Office Insiders Fast) enables users to explore the OneLake catalog directly from Excel, expanding accessibility beyond the existing Microsoft Teams integration. 

• Coming soon, we are releasing the general availability of on-premises data gateways support for Amazon S3, S3-compatible sources, and Google Cloud Platform allows users to create shortcuts to on-premises data sources hosted behind a firewall or within a Virtual Private Cloud. 

• The enhancements for cross-tenant sharing, including the ability to share multiple tables at once, Lakehouse schemas, as well as tables from Fabric SQL databases, KQL databases, and OneLake shortcuts (coming soon). This shared data can now be accessed via SQL analytics endpoints and semantic models. 

• An updated version of the Fabric Link to Dataverse preview enables even faster and more secure data virtualization from Dataverse, the data platform for the Power Platform and Dynamics 365, thanks to back-end improvements. We are also announcing a new Mirrored Dataverse option in Fabric. Learn more about both announcements. 

• Multi-tenant organization (MTO) support is now generally available.

• CI/CD support for OneLake shortcuts is now in preview.

Fabric empowers every business user with AI capabilities

Fabric empowers business users to quickly uncover key insights in a Power BI report by simply asking Copilot. With AI-enhanced Q&A and intuitive visuals seamlessly embedded in Microsoft 365 apps, everyone can better understand and act on their data with ease. To further empower this mission, we’re announcing that: 

• The preview of Direct Lake semantic models in Power BI desktop, which allows users to build Power BI semantic models for lightning-fast reports that query data directly from OneLake without scheduling refreshes and without data duplication. This feature will also enable users to add in tables from multiple Fabric artifacts in the same Direct Lake semantic model for ultimate reusability of OneLake data.

• The preview of Datapoint annotations in Power BI add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint, which allows users to add descriptive text to a specific data point within a visualization.

Fabric provides a mission-critical foundation 

Our final promise is that you can confidently deploy and manage Microsoft Fabric with category-leading performance, instant scalability, shared resilience, and built-in security, governance, and compliance. To further that mission, we’re excited to introduce several enhancements to our mission-critical promise, including: 

Mission-critical foundation enhancement with Microsoft Purview:

• Coming soon, the preview of Microsoft Purview for Copilot in Power BI. The integration will enable discovery of data risks such as sensitive data in user prompts and responses, protect sensitive data with Insider Risk Management to identify and investigate risky AI usage, and govern AI usage with audit, eDiscovery, retention policies, and non-compliant usage detection.  

• Coming soon, we are expanding Purview Data Loss Prevention policies Fabric coverage beyond lakehouses and semantic models, to now also include Fabric KQL databases and mirrored databases. This will allow security admins to detect sensitive data uploads, such as SSNs, and trigger automated actions in more sources. 

• The preview of Data Observability within the Unified Catalog to investigate the relationship between data products and any assets (including Fabric assets) associated with them to identify the root cause of quality issues. 

• Read more in the secure and govern your data with Microsoft Purview blog.

Getting started with Microsoft Fabric 

New customers can try out everything Fabric has to offer by signing up for a free 60-day trial—no credit card information required. Learn how to start your free trial. 

If you’re considering purchasing Fabric and need help choosing a SKU, we’re excited to share that a new Fabric SKU Estimator will soon be available in public preview. Stay tuned. 

Watch the action at the Fabric Conference

To see these announcements in action, register and secure your spot today through Wednesday April 2, 2025. With over 200 expert-led sessions, you can join thousands of attendees who are diving deep into Microsoft Fabric, exploring innovations in AI, databases, analytics, business intelligence, and more.  

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric 

To learn more about Fabric:  

• Sign up for the Fabric free trial.
• View the updated Fabric Roadmap.
• Visit the Fabric website.
• Join the Fabric community.
• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.
• See how the Microsoft IDEAS team is building on Fabric. 
• Explore the Fabric technical documentation. 
• Check out the newly launched Fabric Tech Talk Fridays (F²T²), which is the go-to show for Fabric MVPs, users, and fans. Join us for live demos, real use cases, and expert insights. Watch the latest episodes here. 

Read additional blogs by industry-leading partners: 

• The Future of Microsoft Fabric and Enterprise Innovation by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PWC). 
• How to navigate the complexity of data supply chains by Ernst & Young Global Limited (EY). 
• How Microsoft is making data platforms smarter by Hitachi Solutions. 
• Healthcare Innovation with Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft Fabric meets Agentic AI by Sonata Software. 
• Unlocking business potential with Microsoft Fabric by Eide Bailly. 
• A comprehensive solution for Healthcare on Microsoft Fabric by Mandelbulb Technologies. 
• Microsoft Fabric raises the bar again by Kanerika Software. 
• Implementing Data Agents in Microsoft Fabric and integrating predictive analytics into Power BI and Migrating from On-Prem SQL to Microsoft Fabric by Baker Tilly US, LLP. 
• Fabric Copilot is now available for all SKUs! by RSM US, LLP. 
• Smart Manufacturing: Unlocking Real-Time Intelligence with Azure IoT Operations and Microsoft Fabric by b.telligent. 

The post FabCon 2025: Fueling tomorrow’s AI with new agentic capabilities and security innovations in Fabric  appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

With Fabric, we focused on simplicity, openness, and autonomy. All Fabric workloads work together seamlessly out-of-the-box without the myriad of infrastructure and configuration settings you typically find in data platforms so you can focus on getting results. You can ingest structured and unstructured data in any format into OneLake’s open Delta Parquet format and even access third-party tools from industry leading software companies built directly into Fabric. Advanced security, governance, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities are woven into the platform with personalized experiences for admins and users alike. Microsoft Copilot and other AI capabilities are built into every layer of Fabric to help data professionals and business users automate routine tasks and get more done. In fact, we’ve found that users were 52% faster in completing standard data analysis tasks and uncovered insights 36% more accurately when using Copilot in Fabric, with 90% saying they were likely to adopt Copilot in Fabric.¹  

Fabric’s vision for a data platform has highly resonated with the industry, and more than 17,000 customers, including 70% of the Fortune 500, are already using Fabric to empower their data teams.

• Melbourne Airport, the second busiest in Australia, used Fabric to analyze their operational data in real-time and gained 30% increased performance efficiency across data-related operations. “It’s a radical and powerful new technology that can feel just like using Microsoft Excel or Power BI. But once in the hands of the user, it doesn’t feel like a new, complex technology at all,” Irfan Khan, Head of Data and Analytics.  
• Chanel, a world leader in luxury fashion, adopted Fabric not only to drive more value from its data and support their AI innovation, but also safeguard its data at rest and in-transit with Fabric’s end-to-end, built-in security, governance, and reliability. “We chose Microsoft Fabric as the foundation of this platform, driven by its ability to implement a data mesh approach,” Olivier Barbonnat, Chief Information Officer Europe.  
• Our own Microsoft IDEAS (insights, data, engineering, analytics, systems) team, one of the largest data teams in the world, transitioned to Fabric to support its AI ambitions. Its solution now encompasses 27,000 data sources, 420 petabytes of data, 35,000 data pipelines, 38,000 semantic models, and more than 600 teams relying on its models. The IDEAS team estimated it has received a 50% efficiency boost from consolidating assets in OneLake, using modern tools such as Spark and Python, Direct Lake mode in Microsoft Power BI, and AI-assisted coding through IDEAS Copilot.

Schaeffler, Hitachi Solutions, KPMG, Epic, and many other customers have seen a transformational impact to how they process data. You can explore all these Fabric stories on the Microsoft Customer Stories page. One of the reasons Fabric caught the imagination of so many is because, with Fabric, you can simplify and future-proof your data estate. Fabric’s capabilities and workloads will continue to expand and be seamlessly infused into our pre-integrated platform, helping you keep up with the technology trends without added work.  

And since launching Fabric, we’ve added new ways to bring data into Fabric with capabilities like mirroring and new shortcut sources. We’ve expanded Copilot in Fabric across almost every experience to help everyone automate routine tasks. We’ve added a multitude of security and governance features to help you make sure your data is secure at every step of its journey. We’ve added the ability to extend Fabric further with native, industry-specific workloads from Microsoft and other software developers. And most impactfully, we launched a new workload to help organizations make better decisions from Internet of Things (IoT), logs, and telemetry data—Real-Time Intelligence.  

With Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, we transformed Fabric into a platform equipped to support your operational scenarios and data in motion. And now, we’re helping you bring transactional scenarios to Fabric with the introduction of Fabric Databases. 

Introducing a unified data platform with Fabric Databases

Currently, the data and AI technology market is massively fragmented with hundreds of vendors and thousands of services. We believe the future of data and AI is the convergence of all your data services into a unified, open, and extensible platform, so you no longer have to manually stitch together disconnected services.  

Today, we’re thrilled to announce a major leap toward this goal with Fabric Databases, now in preview. Fabric Databases represent a new class of cloud databases that brings a world-class transactional database natively to Microsoft Fabric for app developers. With the addition of Fabric Databases, Fabric now brings together both transactional and analytical workloads, creating a truly unified data platform. Developers can streamline application development with simple, autonomous, and AI-optimized databases that provision in seconds and are secured by default with features like cloud authentication and database encryption. Built-in vector search, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) support, and Azure AI integration simplify AI app development, and your data is instantly available in OneLake for advanced analytics. Developers can even use Copilot in Fabric to translate natural language queries into SQL and get inline code completion alongside code fixes and explanations.

SQL database, the first available in Fabric, was built on our industry-leading SQL Server engine and the simple and intuitive SaaS platform of Fabric. In fact, data professionals who’ve tried SQL database in Fabric were able to complete common database tasks up to 71% faster and with 63% more effective task completion. They reported feeling 84% more confident in these tasks and finding the tasks up to 91% less difficult.²  These results were even more pronounced for people who were newer to cloud. Those with less than two years of cloud platform experience benefited the most in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, highlighting the simplicity and intuitiveness of Fabric Databases. 

SQL database is just the beginning for Fabric Databases, with more databases on the roadmap. Whether you’re an experienced data professional or just getting started, you can build AI apps faster and more confidently on Fabric Databases.

To learn more, read the Fabric Databases blog post, watch the Microsoft Mechanics deep dive video, and watch the following sizzle video:

General availability of Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

We’re also thrilled to announce Real-Time Intelligence is now generally available. With Real-Time Intelligence, you get both pro-dev and no-code tools to ingest high-volume streaming data with high granularity, dynamically transform streaming data, query data in real-time for instant insights, and trigger automated actions based on the data. The Real-time hub provides a central place to discover and manage all your streaming data. Dener Motorsport, a participant in the annual Porsche Carrera Cup Brasil event, used Real-Time Intelligence for in-race analytics, and their CEO, Dener Pires, said “Before we used Microsoft Fabric and Real-Time Intelligence, it was probably 30 minutes before the engineers knew that something was wrong with a car, could get the data, analyze it, and provide a solution. Today that process is done in minutes.” Check out this blog post and the following demo to see Real-Time Intelligence in action: 

OneLake catalog—a complete catalog for discovery, management, and governance

No matter what data project you’re trying to accomplish, it starts with the right foundation. OneLake, Fabric’s unified, multi-cloud data lake, is built for everyone in your entire organization as the single point to discover and explore your data. With OneLake shortcuts and mirroring, you can unify all of your multi-cloud and on-premise sources and enable your people to work from the same data—meaning fewer copies of data, better collaboration between your teams, and easier, more streamlined analysis. And since data is stored in an open format, you can use data in OneLake for all your data projects, no matter the vendor or service.  

Today, we’re excited to announce the OneLake catalog, a complete solution to explore, manage, and govern your entire Fabric data estate. The OneLake catalog comes with two tabs, Explore and Govern, that can help all Fabric users discover and manage trusted data, as well as provide governance for data owners with valuable insights, recommended actions, and tooling. Since the OneLake catalog is an evolution of the OneLake data hub, it already shows up in Microsoft 365, such as in Excel and Microsoft Teams and many other products in the Microsoft cloud for easy data consumption. OneLake catalog value can be extended to the Microsoft Purview data governance solution, Unified Catalog, which offers the data office, data stewards, and data owners advanced governance capabilities, including data quality and a global catalog for the heterogeneous data estate. The Explore tab is now generally available, and the Govern tab will be coming soon in preview.  

Learn more about the OneLake catalog by reading this blog post and by watching the following demo:

More Fabric innovation

The introduction of Fabric Databases and the growing opportunity with generative AI in accelerating data projects has encouraged us to reimagine the pillars of Fabric. We are now focused on making sure Fabric can provide you with: 

• An AI-powered data platform. Fabric can give your teams the AI-powered tools needed for any data project in a pre-integrated and optimized SaaS environment. You can even extend Fabric further by adding other native workloads from the Workload Hub, created by industry-leading partners.  
• An open and AI-ready data lake. Fabric can help you access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single data lake, work from the same copy of data across analytics engines, and ensure your data is ready to power AI innovation.  
• AI-enabled business users. Fabric can empower everyone to better understand your data with AI-enhanced Q&A experiences and visuals embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps they use every day. 
• A mission-critical foundation. You can confidently deploy and manage Fabric with category-leading performance, instant scalability, shared resilience, and built-in security, governance, and compliance. 

Check out the new Fabric sizzle video to see these pillars in action: 

We’re excited to share a huge slate of announcements designed to help us better accomplish each goal above. These enhancements include: 

Fabric workload enhancements

• The general availability of sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, a single place for all your environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data needs. Julie Nikulina, IT Solutions Engineer at Schaeffler AG, a global automotive and industrial supplier, mentioned that, “thanks to Microsoft Fabric, we’ll be able to answer lots of questions about climate neutrality and decarbonization company-wide via a single platform—and we can implement new use cases in short sprints within two to six weeks.”  
• Coming soon, the preview of AI functions in Fabric notebooks, which provide a simplified API for common AI text enrichments like summarization, translation, sentiment analysis, and more. 
• The general availability of API for GraphQL, which is an API to help you access data from multiple sources in Fabric with a single query API. 
• The preview of several enhancements to Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, which include new Fabric events, enhancements to Eventstreams and Eventhouses, and easier real-time dashboard sharing. 
• The preview of the Copilot in Fabric experience for data pipelines in Fabric Data Factory. 
• The preview of our integration with Esri ArcGIS for advanced spatial analytics. 

Microsoft OneLake enhancements

• The preview of open mirroring, a feature that allows any application or data provider to write change data directly into a mirrored database within Fabric. 
• The general availability of Azure SQL DB mirroring and the preview of SQL MI mirroring. 

New AI capabilities in Fabric

• Coming soon, the preview of AI skill enhancements, including a more conversational experience and support for semantic models and Eventhouse KQL databases. 
• Coming soon, the preview of AI skill integration with Agent Service in the newly announced Azure AI Foundry, allowing developers to use AI skills as a core knowledge source. 

Platform-wide enhancements

• The preview of workspace monitoring, which provides detailed diagnostic logs for workspaces to troubleshoot performance issues, capacity performance, and data downtime. 
• The general availability of the Workload Development Kit, created to help software developers design, build, and interoperate applications within Fabric. We’re excited to see many of our industry-leading partners announce preview of their workload hub offerings, including Quantexa, SAS, Teradata, Osmos, Esri, and Profisee. 
• The preview of further integration with Microsoft Purview including extending Protection policies to enforce access permissions to more sources and using Data Loss Prevention policies to restrict access to semantic models with sensitive data. 
• The general availability of external data sharing allows you to directly share OneLake tables and folders with other Fabric tenants in an easy, quick, and secure manner. 
• Fabric is FedRAMP High certified for the Azure Commercial cloud, the highest level of compliance and security standards required by the federal government for cloud service providers. Now government agencies can run Fabric on the Azure Commercial cloud while maintaining strict compliance. 

You can learn more about all of these announcements and so much more in the Fabric November 2024 Update blog post and the numerous blog posts that will go live throughout this week on the Fabric blog channel.  

Fabric billing and consumption updates

Finally, we’re making some important changes to Fabric’s billing model. First, coming soon, organizations with multiple capacities can now direct Copilot in Fabric consumption and billing to a specific capacity, no matter where the Copilot in Fabric usage actually takes place. Admins can assign specific members of their organization to the specified F64 or higher capacity for all of their Copilot requests. These requests will be consumed and billed on that assigned F64+ capacity, ensuring Copilot in Fabric usage doesn’t impact priority jobs while expanding Copilot access to any workspace regardless of its capacity.

Additionally, we’re providing capacity admins with more control over the Fabric jobs running in their capacities. Surge protection, now in preview, helps protect capacities from unexpected surges in background workload consumption. Admins can use surge protection to set a limit on background activity consumption, which will prevent background jobs from starting when reached. Admins can configure different limits for each capacity in your organization to give you the flexibility to meet your needs.

Watch Fabric in action at Microsoft Ignite

Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2024 from November 19 to November 21, 2024 to see all of these announcements in action across the following sessions:  

• “Microsoft Fabric: What’s new and what’s next” with Arun Ulagaratchagan and Amir Netz
• “Power AI apps with unified data and insights in Microsoft Fabric” with Panos Antonopoulos, Anna Hoffman, and Asad Khan 
• “Ingest, govern, and secure your data with OneLake” with Josh Caplan, Wilson Lee, and Adi Regev 
• “Unlock the power of Real-Time Intelligence in the era of AI” with Yitzhak Kesselman, Tessa Kloster, Niraj Revankar, Vijay Sankaran, and Ksenia Suresh. 

And six other Fabric breakout sessions. You can also join us at labs and theater sessions throughout the event. Find all the data-related sessions at Ignite. You can also learn about other announcements across our Azure portfolio by reading these blogs by Jessica Hawk and Omar Khan. 

• The next wave of Azure innovation: Azure AI Foundry, intelligent data, and more: We’re bringing a huge range of innovation to our AI platform including the new Azure AI Foundry, a unified platform designed to empower both developers and business decision-makers in the age of AI. 
• Scale your AI transformation with a powerful, secure, and adaptive cloud infrastructure: We’re also announcing cloud and AI infrastructure announcements, from advancements in chips and liquid cooling to new data integrations and more flexible cloud deployments.  

Finally, if you want more strategic guidance to help you along your data and analytics journey in the era of AI, you should watch the recent Data and Analytics Forum.

Getting started with Microsoft Fabric

New customers can try out everything Fabric has to offer by signing up for a free 60-day trial—no credit card information required. Learn how to start your free trial.  

If you’re considering purchasing Fabric and need help deciding on a SKU, we’re excited to share a new Fabric SKU estimator, now in private preview. You can sign up to try out this tool as part of the early adopter program—try the SKU estimator.

Start building your Fabric skills

Be one of the first to start using Fabric Databases

Ready to build reliable, highly scalable applications where cloud authentication and encryption are secured by default? Starting December 3, 2024, join live sessions with database experts and see just how easy it is to get started. View the schedule and register for the series.

Get certified in Microsoft Fabric—for free

Get ready to fast-track your career by earning your Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate certification. For a limited time, we’re offering 5,000 free DP-600 exam vouchers to eligible Fabric community members. Complete your exam by the end of the year and join the ranks of certified experts. Don’t miss this opportunity to get certified. 

A new Fabric certification for data engineers

We’re excited to announce a brand-new certification for data engineers. The new Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification will help you demonstrate your skills with data ingestion, transformation, administration, monitoring, and performance optimization in Fabric. To earn this certification, pass Exam DP-700: Implementing Data Engineering Solutions Using Microsoft Fabric, currently in beta.

Join us at the 2025 Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

Looking to gain hands-on experience with Fabric and learn directly from the people who created it? If so, join us from March 29 to April 3, 2025, at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Register today. 

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Fabric:  

• Sign up for the Fabric free trial. 
• Register for the Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum. 
• View the updated Fabric Roadmap. 
• Visit the Fabric website. 
• Join the Fabric community. 
• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog. 
• Explore the Fabric technical documentation.

Read additional blogs by industry-leading partners:

• “Data Governance in Microsoft Fabric with Microsoft Purview,” by CloudThat Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
•  “Key Fabric Announcements and Overview of Fabric Databases,” by Telefónica Tech.
• “Ignite 2024 – Microsoft Fabric announcements: the continued convergence of data platform and analytics to deliver intelligent insights,” by BJSS. 
• “Architecting tomorrow—A Microsoft Fabric Blueprint to intelligent enterprise covering Fabric Databases, AI Skills, Fabric and Microsoft Purview, Apache Iceberg support in OneLake,” by Avasoft Inc.
• “Microsoft Fabric Databases,” “Microsoft Fabric’s AI Skills,” and “Data Engineering: Liquid Clustering in Fabric,” by Verne Tech.
• “A First Look at Fabric Mirroring for SQL Managed Instance,” by Coeo Ltd.
• “Leveraging Microsoft Fabric for Dynamics 365 with Dataverse,” and “Automating Data Workflows in Microsoft Fabric: A Low-Code/No-Code Approach,” by PreludeSys.
• “Enabling self-service for supply chain analytics with Microsoft Fabric and Direct Lake,” “Transforming data operations with Microsoft Fabric and CI/CD for ISVs,” and “How Microsoft Fabric transformed data analytics for an ISV with Real-Time Intelligence,” by MAQ Software.
• “Real Time Intelligence for the Rest of Us with Microsoft Fabric,” by iLink Digital.       

¹Based upon n=209 user studies conducted by Microsoft Corporation in October 2024 that measured four common metrics associated with the consumption experience of Power BI in Microsoft Fabric. Qualitative sentiment gathered upon task completion. The actual results may vary. 

²Based upon n=210 user studies conducted with technical practitioners by Microsoft Corporation in October 2024 that measured time to complete four common tasks associated with AI application development on a SQL database in Microsoft Fabric and on Azure SQL Database. Actual results may vary based upon individual performance and sentiment.

The post Accelerate app innovation with an AI-powered data platform appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Thank you to everyone joining us at the first annual European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference this week in Stockholm, Sweden! Besides seeing the beautiful views of Old Town, attendees are getting an immersive analytics and AI experience across 120 sessions, 3 keynotes, 10 workshops, an expo hall, community lounge, and so much more. They are seeing firsthand the latest capabilities we are bringing to the Fabric platform. For those unable to attend, this blog will highlight the most significant announcements that are already changing the way our customers interact with Fabric. 

Microsoft Fabric

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Over 14,000 customers have invested in the promise of Microsoft Fabric to accelerate their analytics including industry-leaders like KPMG, Chanel, and Grupo Casas Bahia. For example, Chalhoub Group, a regional luxury retailer with over 750 experiential retail stories, used Microsoft Fabric to modernize its analytics and streamline its data sources into one platform, significantly speeding up their processes.

“It’s about what the technology enables us to achieve—a smarter, faster, and more connected operational environment.”

—Mark Hourany, Director of People Analytics, Chalhoub Group

Check out the myriad ways customers are using Microsoft Fabric to unlock more value from their data:

New capabilities coming to Microsoft Fabric

Since launching Fabric, we’ve released thousands of product updates to create a more complete data platform for our customers. And we aren’t slowing down anytime soon. We’re thrilled to share a new slate of announcements that are applying the power of AI to help you accelerate your data projects and get more done.

Specifically, these updates are focused on making sure Fabric can provide you with: 

1. AI-powered development: Fabric can give teams the AI-powered tools needed for any data project in a pre-integrated and optimized SaaS environment.

2. An AI-powered data estate: Fabric can help you access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single, open data lake, work from the same copy of data across analytics engines, and use that data to power AI innovation 

3. AI-powered insights: Fabric can empower everyone to better understand their data with AI-powered visuals and Q&A experiences embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps they use every day. 

Let’s look at the latest features and integrations we are announcing in each of these areas. 

AI-powered development

With Microsoft Fabric, you have a single platform that can handle all of your data projects with role-specific tools for data integration, data warehousing, data engineering, data science, real-time intelligence, and business intelligence. All of your data teams can work together in the same pre-integrated, optimized experience, and get started immediately with an intuitive UI and low code tools. All the workloads access the same unified data lake, OneLake, and work from a single pool of capacity to simplify the experience and ease collaboration. With built-in security and governance, you can secure your data from any intrusion and ensure only the right people have access to the right data. And as we continue to infuse Copilot and other AI experiences across Fabric, you can not only use Fabric for any application, but also accelerate time to production. In the video below, check out how users can take advantage of Copilot to create end-to-end solutions in Fabric: 

Today, I’m thrilled to share several new enhancements and capabilities coming to the platform and each workload in Fabric.

Fabric platform

We’re building platform-wide capabilities to help you more seamlessly manage DevOps, tackle projects of any scale and complexity. First, we’re updating the UI for deployment pipelines, in preview, to be more focused, easier to navigate, and have a smoother flow, now in preview. Next, we’re introducing the Terraform provider for Fabric, in preview, to help customers ensure deployments and management tasks are executed accurately and consistently. The Terraform provider enables users to automate and streamline deployment and management processes using a declarative configuration language. We are also adding support for Azure service principal in Microsoft Fabric REST APIs to help customers automate the deployment and management of Fabric environments. You can manage principal permissions for Fabric workspaces, as well as the creation and management of Fabric artifacts like eventhouses and lakehouses.

We’re excited to announce the general availability of Fabric Git integration. Sync Fabric workspaces with Git repositories, leverage version control, and collaborate seamlessly using Azure DevOps or GitHub. We are also extending our integration with Visual Studio Code (VS Code). You can now debug Fabric notebooks with the web version of VS Code and integrate Fabric environments as artifacts with the Synapse VS Code extension—allowing you to explore and manage Fabric environments from within VS Code. To learn more about these updates, read the Fabric September 2024 Update blog.

Security and governance

To help organizations govern the massive volumes of data across their data estate, we’re adding more granular data management capabilities including item tagging and enhancements to domains—both of which are now in preview. We’re introducing the ability to apply tags to Fabric items, helping users more easily find and use the right data. Once applied, data consumers can view, search, and filter by the applied tags across various experiences. We’re also enhancing domains and subdomains with more controls for admins including the ability to define a default sensitivity label, domain level export and sharing settings, and insights for admins, on tenant domains. Finally, for data owners, we’re adding the ability to search for data by domain, to filter workspaces by domain, and to view domain details in a data item’s location.

Over the past year, we’ve launched a myriad of security features designed to secure your data at every step of the analytics journey. Two of our network security features, trusted workspace access, and managed private endpoints, were previously only available in F64 or higher capacities. We’re excited to share that, based on your feedback, we are making these features available in all Fabric capacities. We’re also making managed private endpoints available in trial capacities as part of this release.

We’re also announcing deeper integration with Microsoft Purview, Microsoft’s unified data security, data governance, and compliance solution. Coming soon, security admins will be able to use Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels to manage who has access to Fabric items with certain labels—similar to Microsoft 365. Also coming soon, we are extending support for Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies, so security admins can apply DLP policies to detect the upload of sensitive data, like social security numbers, to a lakehouse in Fabric. If detected, the policy will trigger an automatic audit activity, can alert the security admin, and can even show a custom policy tip to data owners to remedy themselves. These capabilities will be available at no additional cost during preview in the near term, but will be part of a new Purview pay-as-you-go consumptive model, with pricing details to follow in the future. Learn more about how to secure your Fabric data with Microsoft Purview by watching the following video: 

You can also complement and extend the built-in governance in Fabric by seamlessly connecting your Fabric data to the newly reimagined Purview Data Governance solution—now generally available. This new solution delivers an AI-powered, business-friendly, and unified solution that can seamlessly connect to data sources within Fabric and across your data estate to streamline and accelerate the activation of your modern data governance practice. Purview integrations enable Fabric customers to discover, secure, govern, and manage Fabric items from a single pane of glass within Purview for an end-to-end approach to their data estate. Learn more about these Microsoft Purview innovations.  

Workload enhancements and updates

We’re also making significant updates across the six core workloads in Fabric: Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, Data Science, Real-Time Intelligence, and Microsoft Power BI.

Data Factory

In the Data Factory workload, built to help you solve some of the most complex data integration scenarios, we are simplifying the data ingestion experience with copy job, transforming the dataflow capability, and releasing enhancements for data pipelines. With copy job, now in preview, you can ingest data at petabyte scale, without creating a dataflow or data pipeline. Copy job supports full, batch, and incremental copy from any data sources to any data destinations. Next, we are releasing the Copilot in Fabric experience for Dataflows Gen2 into general availability—empowering everyone to design dataflows with the help of an AI-powered expert. We’re also releasing Fast Copy in Dataflows Gen2 into general availability, enabling you to ingest large amounts of data using the same high-performance backend for data movement used in Data Factory (e.g., “copy” activity in data pipelines, or copy job). Lastly for Dataflows Gen2, we are introducing incremental refresh into preview, allowing you to limit refreshes to just new or updated data to reduce refresh times.

Along with the dataflow announcements, we’re announcing an array of enhancements for data pipelines in Fabric, including the general availability of the on-premises data gateway integration, the preview of Fabric user data functions in data pipelines, the preview of invoke remote pipeline to call Azure Data Factory (ADF) and Synapse pipelines from Fabric, and a new session tag parameter for Fabric Spark notebook activity to enable high-concurrency Notebook runs. Additionally, we’ve made it easier to bring ADF pipelines into Fabric by linking your existing pipelines to your Fabric workspace. You’ll be able to fully manage your ADF factories directly from the Fabric workspace UI and convert your ADF pipelines into native Fabric pipelines with an open-source GitHub project. 

Data Engineering

For the Data Engineering workload, we’re updating the native execution engine for Fabric Spark and releasing upgraded Fabric Runtime 1.3 into general availability. The native execution engine enhances Spark job performance by running queries directly on lakehouse infrastructure, achieving up to four times faster performance compared to traditional Spark based on the TPC-DS 1TB benchmark. The native execution engine can now, in preview, support Fabric Runtime 1.3, which together can further enhance the performance of Spark jobs and queries for both data engineering and data science projects. This engine has been completely rewritten to offer superior query performance across data processing; extract, transform, load (ETL); data science, and interactive queries. We are also excited to announce a new acceleration tab and UI enablement for the native execution engine.

Additionally, we are announcing an extension of support in Spark to mirrored databases, providing a consistent and convenient way to access and explore databases seamlessly with the Spark engine. You can easily add data sources, explore data, perform transformations, and join your data with other lakehouses and mirrored databases. Finally, we are excited to launch T-SQL notebooks into public preview. The T-SQL notebook enables SQL developers to author and run T-SQL code with a connected Fabric data warehouse or SQL analytics endpoint, allowing them to execute complex T-SQL queries, visualize results in real-time, and document analytical process within a single, cohesive interface. 

Data Warehouse

We are excited to announce the Copilot in Fabric experience for Data Warehouse is now in preview. This AI assistant experience can help developers generate T-SQL queries for data analysis, explain and add in-line code comments for existing T-SQL queries, fix broken T-SQL code, and answer questions about general data warehousing tasks and operations. Learn more about the Copilot experience for Data Warehouse here. And as mentioned above, we are announcing T-SQL notebooks—allowing you to create a notebook item directly from the data warehouse editor in Fabric and use the rich capabilities of notebooks to run T-SQL queries.

Real-Time Intelligence

In May 2024, we launched a new workload called Real-Time Intelligence that combined Synapse Real-Time Analytics and Data Activator with a range of additional new features, currently in preview, to help organizations make better decisions with up-to-the-minute insights. We are excited to share new capabilities, all in preview, to help you better ingest, analyze, and visualize your real-time data.

First, we’re announcing the launch of the new Real-Time hub user experience; a redesigned and enhanced experience with a new left navigation, a new page called “My Streams” to create and access custom streams, and four new eventstream connectors: Azure SQL Managed Instance – change data capture (MI CDC), SQL Server on Virtual Machine – change data capture (VM CDC), Apache Kafka, and Amazon MSK Kafka. These new sources empower you to build richer, more dynamic eventstreams in Fabric. We’re also enhancing eventstream capabilities by supporting eventhouse as a new destination for your data streams. Eventhouses, equipped with KQL databases, are designed to analyze large volumes of data, particularly in scenarios that demand real-time insight and exploration.

We’re also pleased to announce an upgrade to the Copilot in Fabric experience in Real-Time Intelligence, which translates natural language into KQL, helping you better understand and explore your data stored in Eventhouse. Now, the assistant supports a conversational mode, allowing you to ask follow-up questions that build on previous queries within the chat. With the addition of multi-variate anomaly detection, it’s even easier to discover the unknowns in your high-volume, high-granularity data. You can also have Copilot create a real-time dashboard instantly based on the data in your table, providing immediate insights you can share in your organization.

Finally, we are upgrading the Data Activator experience to make it easier to define a variety of rules to act in response to changes in your data over time, and the richness of our rules have improved to include more complex time window calculations and responding to every event in a stream. You can set up alerts from all your streaming data, Power BI visuals, and real-time dashboards and now even set up alerts directly on your KQL queries. With these new enhancements, you can make sure action is taken the moment something important happens.

Learn more about all of these workload enhancements in the Fabric September 2024 Update blog.

Power BI

We’re thrilled to announce new capabilities across Power BI that will make it easier to track and use the KPIs that matter most to you, create organizational apps, and work with Direct Lake semantic models. 

First, we are announcing the preview of Metric sets which will allow users to promote consistent and reliable metrics in large organizations across Fabric, making it easier for end users to discover and use standardized metrics from corporate models. With Metric sets, trusted creators within an organization can develop standardized metrics, which incorporate essential business logic from Power BI. These creators can organize the metrics into collections, promote and certify them, and make them easily discoverable for end users and other creators. These endorsed and promoted metrics can then be used to build Power BI reports, improving data quality across the organization, and can also be reused in other Fabric solutions, such as notebooks.

We’re improving organizational apps in Power BI, a key tool for packaging and securely distributing Power BI reports to your organization. Now in preview, you can create multiple organizational apps in each workspace, and they can contain other Fabric items like notebooks and real-time dashboards. The app interface can even be customized, giving you more control over the color, navigation style, and landing experience.

We’re also making it easier to work with Direct Lake semantic models with new version history for semantic models, similar to the experience found across the Microsoft 365 apps. Power BI users can also now live edit Direct Lake semantic models right from Power BI Desktop. And we’re excited to announce a capability widely asked for by Power BI users: a dark mode in Power BI Desktop. 

Finally, we’re announcing the general availability of OneLake integration for semantic models in Import mode. OneLake integration automatically writes data imported into your semantic models to Delta Lake tables in OneLake so that you can enjoy the benefits of Fabric without any migration effort. Once added to a lakehouse in OneLake, you can use T-SQL, Python, Scala, PySpark, Spark SQL, or R on these Delta tables to consume this data and add business value. All of this value comes at no additional cost as data stored in OneLake for Power BI import semantic models is included in the price of your Power BI licensing.

Learn more about the Power BI announcements in the Power BI September 2024 Feature blog. Also see the AI-powered insights section below for new Copilot experiences for Power BI creators and consumers.

AI-powered data estate

With OneLake, Fabric’s unified data lake, you can create a truly AI-powered data estate to fuel your AI innovation and data culture. OneLake’s shortcuts and mirroring capabilities enable you to access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single, intuitively organized data lake. With your data in OneLake, you can then work from a single copy across analytics engines, whether you are using Spark, T-SQL, KQL, or Analysis Services and even access that data from other apps like Microsoft Excel or Teams. Today, we are thrilled to share even more capabilities and enhancements coming to OneLake that can help you better connect to and manage your data estate.

One of the biggest benefits of OneLake is the ability to create shortcuts to your data sources, which virtualizes data in OneLake without moving or duplicating it. We are pleased to announce that shortcuts for Google Cloud Services (GCS) and S3-compatible sources are now generally available. These shortcuts also support the on-premise data gateway, which you can use to connect to your on-premise S3 compatible sources as well as GCS buckets that are protected by a virtual private cloud. We’ve also made enhancements to the REST APIs for OneLake shortcuts, including adding support for all current shortcut types and introducing a new list operation. With these improvements, you can programmatically create and manage your OneLake shortcuts.

We’re also excited to announce further integration with Azure Databricks with the ability to access Databricks Unity Catalog tables directly from OneLake—now in preview. Users can just provide the Azure Databricks workspace URL and select the catalog, and Fabric creates a shortcut for every table in the selected catalog, keeping the data in sync in near real-time. Once your Azure Databricks Catalog item is created, it behaves the same as any other item in Fabric, so you can access the table through SQL endpoints, notebooks, or Direct Lake mode for Power BI reports. Learn more about the OneLake shortcut and Azure Databricks announcements in the Fabric September 2024 Updates blog.

At Microsoft Build last May, we announced an expanded partnership with Snowflake that gives our customers the flexibility to easily connect and work across our tools. Today, I’m excited to share progress on this partnership with the upcoming preview of shortcuts to Iceberg tables. In the coming weeks, Microsoft Fabric engines will be able to consume Iceberg data with no movement or duplication using OneLake shortcuts. Simply point to an Iceberg dataset from Snowflake or another Iceberg-compatible service, and OneLake virtualizes the table as a Delta Lake table for broad compatibility across Fabric engines. This means you can work with a single copy of your data across Snowflake and Fabric. With the ability to write Iceberg data to OneLake from Snowflake, Snowflake customers will have the flexibility to store Iceberg data in OneLake and use it across Fabric.

Finally, we’ve released mirroring support for Snowflake databases into general availability—providing a seamless, no-ETL experience for integrating existing Snowflake data with the rest of your data in Microsoft Fabric. With this capability, you can continuously replicate Snowflake data directly into Fabric OneLake in near real-time, while maintaining strong performance on your transactional workloads. Learn more about Snowflake mirroring in Fabric.

AI-powered insights

With your data teams using the AI-enhanced tools in Fabric to accelerate development of insights across your data estate, you then need to ensure these insights reach those who can use them to inform decisions. With easy-to-understand Power BI reports and AI-powered Q&A experiences, Fabric bridges the gap between data and business results to help you foster a culture that empowers everyone to find data-driven answers.

We’re announcing a richer Copilot experience in Power BI to help create reports in a clearer, more transparent way. This new experience, now in preview, includes improved conversational abilities between you and Copilot that makes it easier to provide more context to Copilot initially so you can get the report you need on the first try. Copilot will even provide report outlines to improve transparency on data fields being used. We are also releasing the ability to auto-generate descriptions for measures into general availability. Lastly, report viewers can now use Copilot to summarize a report or page right from the Power BI mobile app, now in preview.

We’re also enhancing email subscriptions for reports by extending dynamic per recipient subscriptions to include both paginated and Power BI reports. With dynamic subscriptions, you can set up a single email subscription that delivers customized reports to each recipient based on the data in the semantic model. For reports that are too large for email format, we are also giving you the ability to deliver Power BI and paginated report subscriptions to a OneDrive or SharePoint location for easy access. Finally, you can now create print-ready, parameterized paginated reports using the Get Data experience in Power BI Report Builder—accessing over 100 data sources.

Learn more about all of the Power BI announcements in the Power BI September 2024 Feature blog. 

Start building your Fabric skills

We are grateful so many of you have decided to grow your skills with Microsoft Fabric. In the past six months alone, more than 17,000 individuals have earned the Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate certification, making it the fastest growing certification in Microsoft’s history. Today, we’re excited to announce a brand-new certification for data engineers coming in late October. The new Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification will help you prove your skills with data ingestion, transformation, administration, monitoring, and performance optimization in Fabric. 

Our portfolio of Microsoft Credentials for Fabric also includes four Microsoft Applied Skills, which are a complement to Microsoft certifications and free of cost. Applied Skills test your ability to complete a real-world scenario in a lab environment and provide you with formal credentials that showcase your technical skills to employers. For Fabric, we have Applied Skills credentials covering implementing lakehouses, data warehouses, data science and real-time intelligence solutions. 

Visit the Fabric Career Hub to get the best free resources to help you get certified and the latest certification exam discounts. Don’t forget to also join the vibrant Fabric community to connect with like-minded data professionals, get all your Fabric technical questions answered, and stay current on the latest product updates, training programs, events, and more. 

And if you want to test your skills, explore Fabric, and win prizes, you can also register for the Microsoft Fabric and AI Learning Hackathon. To learn more, you can join our Ask Me Anything event on October 8. 

Join us at Microsoft Ignite

We are excited to bring even more innovation to the Microsoft Fabric platform at Microsoft Ignite this year. Join us from November 19 through November 21, 2024 either in person in Chicago or online. You will see firsthand the latest solutions and capabilities across all of Microsoft and connect with experts, community leaders, and partners who can help you modernize and manage your own intelligent apps, safeguard your business and data, accelerate productivity, and so much more. 

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric: 

• Sign up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
• Register for the upcoming Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum. 
• View the updated Microsoft Fabric Roadmap.
• Visit the Microsoft Fabric website.
• Join the Fabric community.
• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.
• Read additional blogs by industry-leading partners: 
  • Plug and play Databricks Unity Catalog in the Microsoft Fabric data platform and Why Microsoft Fabric is critical for AI-driven enterprises, by Sonata Software, a leading Modernization Engineering company. 
  • Citizen developers can scale work with IT pros like never before with Microsoft Fabric, by iLink Digital, a global provider of next-generation digital transformative solutions. 
  • Significance of version history for Direct Lake semantic models, by Softcrylic, now part of Hexaware Technologies, a global technology and business process services company.  
• Explore the Fabric technical documentation.

The post European Fabric Community Conference 2024: Building an AI-powered data platform appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

With Microsoft Fabric, we are simplifying and future-proofing your data estate with an ever-evolving, AI-powered data analytics platform. Fabric will keep up with the trends for you and seamlessly integrate each new capability so you can spend less time integrating and managing your data estate and more time unlocking value from your data.  

Get started with Microsoft Fabric

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Try for free

Aurizon, Australia’s largest rail freight operator, turned to Fabric to modernize their data estate and analytics system.

“With Microsoft Fabric, we’ve answered many of our questions about navigating future growth, to remove legacy systems, and to streamline and simplify our architecture. A trusted data platform sets us up to undertake complex predictive analytics and optimizations that will give greater surety for our business and drive commercial benefits for Aurizon and our customers in the very near future.”

—Tammy Wigg, Chief Data Analytics Officer at Aurizon

Aurizon is just one among thousands of customers who have already used Fabric to revolutionize how they connect to and analyze their data. In fact, a 2024 commissioned Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study conducted by Forrester Consulting found that Microsoft Fabric customers saw a three-year 379% return on investment (ROI) with a payback period of less than six months. We are thrilled to share a huge range of new capabilities coming to Fabric. These innovations will help you more effectively uncover insights and keep you at the forefront of the trends in data and analytics. Check out a quick overview of the biggest changes coming to Fabric.

Fabric is a complete data platform

Fabric is a complete data platform—giving your data teams the ability to unify, transform, analyze, and unlock value from data from a single, integrated software as a service (SaaS) experience. We are excited to announce additions to the Fabric workloads that will make Fabric’s capabilities even more robust and even customizable to meet the unique needs of each organization. These enhancements include: 

1. A completely redesigned workload, Real-Time Intelligence, that brings together and enhances Synapse Real-Time Analytics and Data Activator to help you analyze and act on high-volume, high-granular event streaming data and even explore your organization’s real-time data in the new Real-time hub.

2. New tools like the Fabric Workload Development Kit, Application Programming Interface (API) for GraphQL™, and “user data functions” that can help developers build powerful solutions on the Fabric platform. 

3. A new feature in the Microsoft Azure Data Factory experience called Data workflow, powered by Apache Airflow runtime, that can help you author, schedule, and monitor workflows or data pipelines using Python. 

Unlock continuous insights with Real-Time Intelligence and the Real-time hub

When we introduced Fabric, it launched with seven core workloads which included Synapse Real-time Analytics for data streaming analysis and Data Activator for monitoring and triggering actions in real-time. We are unveiling an enhanced workload called Real-Time Intelligence that combines these workloads and brings an array of additional new features, in preview, to help organizations make better decisions with up-to-the-minute insights. From ingestion to transformation, querying, and taking immediate action, Real-Time Intelligence is an end-to-end experience that enables seamless handling of real-time data without the need to land it first. With Real-Time Intelligence, you can ingest streaming data with high granularity, dynamically transform streaming data, query data in real-time for instant insights, and trigger actions like alerting a production manager when equipment is overheating or rerunning jobs when data pipelines fail. And with both simple, low-code or no-code, and powerful, code-rich interfaces, Real-Time Intelligence empowers every user to work with real-time data. 

Behind this powerful workload is the Real-time hub, a single place to discover, manage, and use event streaming data from Fabric and other data sources from Microsoft, third-party cloud providers, and other external data sources. Just like the OneLake data hub makes it easy to discover, manage, and use the data at rest, the Real-time hub can help you do the same for data in motion. All events that flow through the Real-time hub can be easily transformed and routed to any Fabric data store and users can create new streams that can be discovered and consumed. From the Real-time hub, users can gain insights through the data profile, configure the right level of endorsement, set alerts on changing conditions and more, all without leaving the hub. While the existing Real-Time Analytics capabilities are still generally available, the Real-time hub and the other new capabilities coming to the Real-Time Intelligence workload are currently in preview. Watch this demo video to check out the redesigned Real-Time Intelligence experience:  

Elcome, one of the world’s largest marine electronics companies, built a new service on Fabric called “Welcome” that helps maritime crews stay connected to their families and friends.

Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence has been the essential building block that’s enabled us to monitor, manage, and enhance the services we provide. With the help of the Real-time hub for centrally managing data in motion from our diverse sources and Data Activator for event-based triggers, Fabric’s end-to-end cloud solution has empowered us to easily understand and act on high-volume, high-granularity events in real-time with fewer resources.”

—Jimmy Grewal, Managing Director of Elcome

Real-time insights are becoming increasingly critical across industries like route optimization in transportation and logistics, grid monitoring in energy and utilities, predictive maintenance in manufacturing, and inventory management in retail. And since Real-Time Intelligence comes fully optimized and integrated in a SaaS platform, adoption is seamless. Strathan Campbell, Channel Environment Technology Lead at One NZ—the largest mobile carrier in New Zealand—said they “…went from a concept to a delivered product in just two weeks.” To learn more about the Real-Time Intelligence workload, watch the “Ingest, analyze and act in real time with Microsoft Fabric” Microsoft Build session or read the Real-Time Intelligence blog.  

Extend Fabric with your own, custom workloads and experiences

Fabric was built from the ground up to be extensible, customizable, and open. Now, we are making it even easier for software developers and customers to design, build, and interoperate applications within Fabric with the new Fabric Workload Development Kit—currently in preview. Applications built with this kit will appear as a native workload within Fabric, providing a consistent experience for users directly in their Fabric environment without any manual effort. Software developers can publish and monetize their custom workloads through Azure Marketplace. And, coming soon, we are creating a workload hub experience in Fabric where users can discover, add, and manage these workloads without ever leaving the Fabric environment. We already have industry-leading partners building on Fabric including SAS, Esri, Informatica, Teradata, and Neo4j.

You can also learn more about the Workload Development Kit by watching the “Extend and enhance your analytics applications with Microsoft Fabric” Microsoft Build session.

We are also excited to announce two new features, both in preview, created with developers in mind: API for GraphQL and user data functions in Fabric. API for GraphQL is a flexible and powerful RESTful API that allows data professionals to access data from multiple sources in Fabric with a single query API. With API for GraphQL, you can streamline requests to reduce network overheads and accelerate response rates. User data functions are user-defined functions built for Fabric experiences across all data services, such as notebooks, pipelines, or event streams. These features enable developers to build experiences and applications using Fabric data sources more easily like lakehouses, data warehouses, mirrored databases, and more with native code ability, custom logic, and seamless integration. You can watch these features in action in the “Introducing API for GraphQL and User Data Functions in Microsoft Fabric” Microsoft Build session.

You can also learn more about the Workload Development Kit, the API for GraphQL, user data functions, and more by reading the Integrating ISV apps with Microsoft Fabric blog.

Orchestrate complex data workflows in the Fabric Data Factory workload

We are also announcing the preview of Data workflows in Fabric as part of the Data Factory experience. Data workflows allow customers to define Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) files for complex data workflow orchestration in Fabric. Data workflows is powered by the Apache Airflow runtime and designed to help you author, schedule and monitor workflows or data pipelines using python. Learn more by reading the data workflows blog.  

Fabric is lake-centric and open

The typical data estate has grown organically over time to span multiple clouds, accounts, databases, domains, and engines with a multitude of vendors and specialized services. OneLake, Fabric’s unified, multi-cloud data lake built to span an entire organization, can connect to data from across your data estate and reduce data duplication and sprawl.  

We are excited to announce the expansion of OneLake shortcuts to connect to data from on-premises and network-restricted data sources beyond just Azure Data Lake Service Gen2, now in preview. With an on-premises data gateway, you can now create shortcuts to Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3, and S3 compatible storage buckets that are either on-premises or otherwise network-restricted. To learn more about these announcements, watch the Microsoft Build session “Unify your data with OneLake and Microsoft Fabric.”  

Empower business users with Fabric

Insights drive impact only when they reach those who can use them to inform actions and decisions. Professional and citizen analysts bridge the gap between data and business results, and with Fabric, they have the tools to quickly manage, analyze, visualize, and uncover insights that can be shared with the entire organization. We are excited to help analysts work even faster and more effectively by releasing the model explorer and the DAX query view in Microsoft Power BI Desktop into general availability.

The model explorer in Microsoft Power BI provides a rich view of all the semantic model objects in the data pane—helping you find items in your data fast. You can also use the model explorer to create calculation groups and reduce the number of measures by reusing calculation logic and simplifying semantic model consumption. 

The DAX query view in Power BI Desktop lets users discover, analyze, and see the data in their semantic model using the DAX query language. Users working with a model can validate data and measures without having to build a visual or use an additional tool—similar to the Explore feature. Changes made to measures can be seamlessly updated directly back to the semantic model. 

To learn more about these announcements and others coming to Power BI, check out the Power BI blog.  

Fabric is AI-powered

When ChatGPT was launched, it had over 100 million users in just over two months—the steepest adoption curve in the history of technology.¹ It’s been a year and a half since that launch, and organizations are still trying to translate the benefit of generative AI from novelty to actual business results. By infusing generative AI into every layer of Fabric, we can empower your data professionals to employ its benefits, in the right context and in the right scenario to get more done, faster.  

Use Copilot in Fabric, now generally available 

Copilot in Fabric was designed to help users unlock the full potential of their data by assisting data professionals to be more productive and business users to explore their data more easily. With Copilot in Fabric, you can use conversational language to create dataflows, generate code and entire functions, build machine learning models, or visualize results. We are excited to share that Copilot in Fabric is now generally available, starting with the Power BI experience. This includes the ability to create stunning reports and summarize your insights into narrative summaries in seconds. Copilot in Fabric is also now enabled on-by-default for all eligible tenants including Copilot in Fabric experiences for Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Warehouse, and Real-Time Intelligence, which are all still in preview. The general availability of Copilot in Fabric for the Power BI experience will be rolling out over the coming weeks to all customers with Power BI Premium capacity (P1 or higher) or Fabric capacity (F64 or higher). 

We are also thrilled to announce a new Copilot in Fabric experience for Real-Time Intelligence, currently in preview, that enables users to explore real-time data with ease. Starting with a Kusto Query Language (KQL) Queryset connected to a KQL Database in an Eventhouse or a standalone Azure Data Explorer database, you can type your question in conversational language and Copilot will automatically translate it to a KQL query you can execute. This experience is especially powerful for users less familiar with writing KQL queries but still want to get the most from their time-series data stored in Eventhouse. 

Create custom Q&A experiences with your data with AI skills 

We are also thrilled to release a new AI capability in preview called AI skills—an innovative experience designed to provide any user with a conversational Q&A experience about their data. AI skills allow you to simply select the data source in Fabric you want to explore and immediately start asking questions about your data—even without any configuration. When answering questions, the generative AI experience will show the query it generated to find the answer and you can enhance the Q&A experience by adding more tables, setting additional context, and configuring settings. AI skills can empower everyone to explore data, build and configure AI experiences, and get the answers and insights they need.  

AI skills will honor existing security permissions and can be configured to respect the unique language and nuances of your organization, ensuring that responses are not just data-driven but steeped in the context of your business operations. And, coming soon, it can also enrich the creation of new copilots in Microsoft Copilot Studio and be interacted with from Copilot for Microsoft for 365. It’s about making your data not just accessible but approachable, inviting users to explore insights through natural dialogue, and shortening the time to insight.

New partnerships with Microsoft Fabric

Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric

With the launch of Fabric, we’ve committed to open data formats, standards, and interoperability with our partners to give our customers the flexibility to do what makes sense for their business. We are taking this commitment a step further by expanding our existing partnership with Snowflake to expand interoperability between Snowflake and Fabric’s OneLake. We are excited to announce future support for Apache Iceberg in Fabric OneLake and bi-directional data access between Snowflake and Fabric. This integration will enable users to analyze their Fabric and Snowflake data written in Iceberg format in any engine within either platform, and access data across apps like Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and Microsoft Azure AI Studio.

With the upcoming availability of shortcuts for Iceberg in OneLake, Fabric users will be able to access all data sources in Iceberg format, including the Iceberg sources from Snowflake, and translate metadata between Iceberg and Delta formats. This means you can work with a single copy of your data across Snowflake and Fabric. Since all the OneLake data can be accessed in Snowflake as well as in Fabric, this integration will enable you to spend less time stitching together applications and your data estate, and more time uncovering insights. To learn more about this announcement, read the Fabric and Snowflake partnership blog.

Adobe and Microsoft Fabric 

We are also excited to announce we are expanding our existing relationship with Adobe. Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and Adobe Campaign will have the ability to federate enterprise data from Fabric. Our joint customers will soon have the capability to connect to Fabric and use the Fabric Data Warehouse for query federation to create and enrich audiences for engagement, without having to transfer or extract the data from Fabric. 

Combine Fabric and Microsoft Azure Databricks to get the best of both worlds

We are excited to announce that we are expanding the integration between Fabric and Azure Databricks—allowing you to have a truly unified experience across both products and pick the right tools for any scenario. 

Azure Databricks Unity Catalog integration with Fabric 

Coming soon, you will be able to access Azure Databricks Unity Catalog tables directly in Fabric, making it even easier to unify Azure Databricks with Fabric. From the Fabric portal, you can create and configure a new Azure Databricks Unity Catalog item in Fabric with just a few clicks. You can add a full catalog, a schema, or even individual tables to link and the management of this Azure Databricks item in OneLake—a shortcut connected to Unity Catalog—is automatically taken care of for you.  

This data acts like any other data in OneLake—you can write SQL queries or use it with any other workloads in Fabric including Power BI through Direct Lake mode. When the data is modified or tables are added, removed, or renamed in Azure Databricks, the data in Fabric will remain always in sync. This new integration makes it simple to unify Azure Databricks data in Fabric and seamlessly use it across every Fabric workload. 

Federate OneLake as a Remote Catalog in Azure Databricks 

Also coming soon, Fabric users will be able to access Fabric data items like lakehouses as a catalog in Azure Databricks. While the data remains in OneLake, you can access and view data lineage and other metadata in Azure Databricks and leverage the full power of Unity Catalog. This includes extending Unity Catalog’s unified governance over data and AI into Azure Databricks Mosaic AI. In total, you will be able to combine this data with other native and federated data in Azure Databricks, perform analysis assisted by generative AI, and publish the aggregated data back to Power BI—making this integration complete across the entire data and AI lifecycle. 

Watch these announcements in action at Microsoft Build 2024

Join us at Microsoft Build from May 21 to 23, 2024 to see all of these announcements in action across the following sessions: 

• “Microsoft Build opening keynote” with Satya Nadella, Kevin Scott, and Rajesh Jha.

• “Next generation AI for developers with the Microsoft Cloud” with Scott Guthrie.

• “Microsoft Fabric: What’s new and what’s next” with Arun Ulagaratchagan and Amir Netz.

• “Ingest, analyze and act in real time with Microsoft Fabric” with Yitzhak Kesselman and Tessa Kloster.

• “Extend and enhance your analytics applications with Microsoft Fabric” with Dipti Borkar and Teddy Bercovitz.

• Introducing API for GraphQL and User Data Functions in Microsoft Fabric” with Monica Boris and Dipti Borkar.

• “Unify your data with OneLake and Microsoft Fabric” with Josh Caplan and Charles Webb.

• “Accelerate insights with real-time Azure SQL Data and Microsoft Fabric” with Anna Hoffman and Bob Ward.
• “Intergrating Azure AI and Microsoft Fabric for Next-Gen AI Solutions” with Nellie Gustafsson and Facundo Santiago.
• “Activate enterprise data in AI-enabled business applications” with Rakesh Krishnan and Srikumar Nair.

You can also try out these new capabilities and everything Fabric has to offer yourself by signing up for a free 60-day trial—no credit card information required. To start your free trial, sign up for a free account (Power BI customers can use their existing account), and once signed in, select start trial within the account manager tool in the Fabric app. Existing Power BI Premium customers can already access Fabric by simply turning on Fabric in their Fabric admin portal. Learn more on the Fabric get started page. 

Join us at the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 

We are excited to announce a European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference that will be held in Stockholm, Sweden from September 23 to 26, 2024. You can see firsthand how Fabric and the rest of the data and AI products at Microsoft can help your organization prepare for the era of AI. You will hear from leading Microsoft and community experts from around the world and get hands on experiences with the latest features from Fabric, Power BI, Azure Databases, Azure AI, Microsoft Purview, and more. You will also have the opportunity to learn from top data experts and AI leaders while having the chance to interact with your peers and share your story. We hope you will join us and see how cutting-edge technologies from Microsoft can enable your business success with the power of Fabric.   

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric: 

• Sign up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
• View the updated Microsoft Fabric Roadmap.
• Visit the Microsoft Fabric website.
• Join the Fabric community.
• Read about other Azure announcements:  

• • From code to production: New ways Azure helps your build transformational AI experiences.

• • Unleashing innovation: The new era of compute powering Azure AI solutions.

• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.
• Read the new Microsoft Fabric security whitepaper.
• Watch the Real-Time Intelligence Microsoft Mechanics video.
• Explore the Fabric technical documentation.

Microsoft Fabric

Experience the next generation in analytics 

Explore capabilities

¹ChatGPT sets record for fastest-growing user base – analyst note, Reuters.

The post Unlock real-time insights with AI-powered analytics in Microsoft Fabric appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform is our solution to help you create a powerful, agile, and secure data and AI foundation, made simple. Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform is a suite of technologies with Microsoft Fabric at its heart that helps organizations harness the full power of their data. By natively integrating products across four workloads—AI, analytics, database, and security—organizations no longer have to bear the cost and burden of stitching together a complex set of disconnected services from multiple vendors themselves. Instead, focusing on making bold, real-time decisions and empowering teams to create and innovate without limits. Learn more about the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform and how Microsoft Fabric fits in by reading Jessica Hawk’s blog “The Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform: unleash your data to accelerate transformation.”

Many of our customers are already taking advantage of our focus on integration to accelerate their time to insight and empower more people to make data-backed decisions. For example, One NZ, one of the largest mobile carriers in New Zealand, wanted to provide nearly 1,000 users with a real-time, tailored view of customer data to provide more tailored and timely customer service. But as Strathan Campbell, Channel Environment Technology Lead at One NZ explains, “Our increasing data volumes started leading to delayed refresh rates in what should have been real-time Power BI dashboards.” They turned to Microsoft Fabric and in particular, Fabric’s real-time analytics capabilities to provide a seamless and easy-to-manage solution.

“What drew us to [Fabric] was that it was an all-in-one solution. Since we didn’t need to buy new components and were already embedded with Power BI, putting the architecture and security in place was quick and easy. Most dashboards are updated every 10 seconds now, which is six times faster than before.”

—Steven Easton, BI Channels Specialist at One NZ

Learn more about One NZ’s journey.

Microsoft Fabric

Bring your data into the era of AI

Try today

Join the thriving Microsoft Fabric community 

It’s been fantastic meeting so many of our most active community members at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference this week. We launched Microsoft Fabric 10 months ago at Microsoft Build—a reimagining of analytics with a single, SaaS platform that could tackle every step of the analytics process, all on a multi-cloud data lake foundation. We were thrilled by the excitement across the millions of active Power BI, Data Factory, and Synapse community members who came together to answer thousands of questions, post ideas, join user groups, and help each other along their data journeys. Your feedback has helped us create and refine so much of what makes Microsoft Fabric great. Thank you all for your ideas and constant support. 

We have created new resources to help you ramp up on Microsoft Fabric and advance your career. First, visit the new Fabric Career Hub, to access a comprehensive learning journey with free on-demand and live training, discounts on certification exams, career insights from community experts, and role guidance to understand how Fabric can open potential opportunities. You can also join the vibrant Fabric Community today and engage with a huge community of data professionals to get help when you’re stuck, learn from peers, showcase your work, and even suggest product improvements. 

We’ve also published an enhanced portfolio of Microsoft Credentials, including the new “Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate” certification, along with several new Microsoft Applied Skills covering scenarios using Microsoft Fabric, like implementing lakehouses, data warehouses, real-time analytics and data science solutions—with more coming out over the next few months. Check them all out on the Microsoft Credentials homepage.

New capabilities coming to Microsoft Fabric 

We have been working tirelessly over the past year to create the richest and most intuitive analytics platform on the market. We are thrilled to share the latest in a long line of innovation that is helping us fulfill the four core promises of Fabric:

1. Fabric is a complete platform
2. Fabric is lake-centric and open
3. Fabric can empower every business user
4. Fabric is AI powered

Fabric is a complete platform

Our first promise is that Fabric is a complete analytics platform with every tool your data scientists, data engineers, data warehousing professionals, analysts, and business users need to unlock value from data in a single unified SaaS platform. It also has the end-to-end, industry-leading security, governance, and data management capabilities needed to protect and manage your data. Let‘s take a look at the latest enhancements to the Fabric platform: 

Over the past few months, we have made significant updates to our platform to help you tackle projects of any scale and complexity. First, we are transforming Microsoft Fabric’s CI/CD experience. This transformation includes support for data pipelines and data warehouses in Fabric Git integration and deployment pipelines. Spark job definition and Spark environment will become available in Git integration. We are also giving you the ability to easily branch out a workspace integrated into Git with just a couple of clicks to help you reduce the time to code. Additionally, because many organizations already have robust CI/CD processes established in tools such as Azure DevOps, we will also support both Fabric Git integration APIs as well as Fabric deployment pipelines APIs, enabling you to integrate Fabric into these familiar CI/CD tools. All of these updates will be launched in a preview experience in early April.

Second, we are significantly updating our dataflows and data pipeline experience in Fabric to help customers more quickly ingest and transform their data. With Fast Copy in Dataflows Gen2, you can ingest a large amount of data using the same data movement backend as the “copy” activity in data pipelines. For data pipelines, you can now access on-premises data using the on-premises Data Gateway—the same gateway used with dataflows. We are also excited to add a new activity, semantic model refresh, that enables you to use Data Factory to orchestrate the refresh of semantic models in Microsoft Fabric. Finally, we are doubling the number of activities supported in a data pipeline from forty to eighty. All of these updates are now in preview and you can try them today. 

We have also listened to your feedback over the past few months and added some highly requested features to make working in Fabric even easier. We’ve released the ability to create folders in your workspaces, now in preview, and we are announcing the ability to create multiple apps in the same workspace, coming soon. We are also excited to share a feature coming soon that will give you the ability to add tags to Fabric items and manage them for enhanced compliance, discoverability, and reuse. Finally, we want to show you a sneak peek of a new feature we are bringing to Microsoft Fabric called task flows. Task flows can help you visualize a data project from end-to-end: 

Security in Microsoft Fabric 

With all your data flowing into the same platform, you need to be certain that data is secure at every step of the analytics journey. With that in mind, we have released a number of enterprise security features that can better protect your data. We recently announced the preview of Azure Private Link support for Microsoft Fabric which can provide secure access to your sensitive data in Microsoft Fabric by providing network isolation and applying required controls on your inbound network traffic. We also announced the preview of Trusted Workspace Access and Managed Private Endpoints which allow secure connections from Microsoft Fabric to data sources that are behind a firewall or not accessible from the public internet. Similarly, we released VNET data gateway into general availability in February which lets you connect your Azure and other data services to Microsoft Fabric and the Power Platform while ensuring no traffic is exposed to a public endpoint. We are thrilled to announce the expansion of these VNET data gateway to include on-premise data behind a VNET—now generally available.

We are also announcing deeper integration with Microsoft Purview’s industry-leading data security and compliance offerings to help you seamlessly secure data across your data estate. First, we are excited to announce that security admins will soon be able to define Purview Information Protection policies in Microsoft Fabric to automatically enforce access permissions to sensitive information in Fabric. Also coming soon is the extension of Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies to Fabric, enabling security teams to automatically identify the upload of sensitive information to Fabric and trigger automatic risk remediation actions. The DLP policies will initially work with Fabric Lakehouses with support for other Fabric workloads to follow. Finally, we are thrilled to announce the upcoming integration with Purview Insider Risk Management which will help you detect, investigate, and act on malicious and inadvertent data oversharing activities in your organization. Learn more about all of these upcoming integrations in the latest Microsoft Purview blog.

Governing data in Microsoft Fabric

With the massive growth in the volume of data, organizations are increasingly moving towards federated governance models where data is governed and managed according to the line of business needs. That is why, when we launched Fabric, we included the ability to create domains which allow tenant admins to delegate control to the domain level, enabling each business department to define its own rules and restrictions according to its specific business need. We have listened to your requests and have added, in preview, the ability for organizations to create subdomains to further refine the way your Fabric data estate is structured. Moreover, we are making it easier to create and manage domains with the ability to set default domains for security groups, the ability to use public admin APIs, and more. Learn more here.

To complement and extend the built-in data governance capability within Microsoft Fabric, we also natively integrate with the Microsoft Purview Data Governance solution. Today, Microsoft is announcing a reimagined data governance experience that offers sophisticated yet simple business-friendly interaction for your multi-cloud, multi-source data estate governance practice. Informed by Microsoft’s own internal journey, this reimagined experience is purpose-built for federated data governance that offers efficient data curation, data quality, and data management backed by actionable insights that help you activate and nurture your governance practice. Microsoft Fabric’s built-in governance, like item inventory, data lineage and metadata are reflected in Purview to accelerate your multi-cloud data estate governance practice.  Learn more about the new Microsoft Purview experience by reading the latest blog.  

Fabric is lake-centric and open

Our second promise was to design Fabric to be lake-centric and open to help you establish a trusted data foundation for your entire data estate. With OneLake, you can connect data from anywhere into a single, multi-cloud data lake for the entire organization, and work from the same copy of data across analytics engines. Two key features in OneLake, Shortcuts, and Mirroring, simplify how you bring data into OneLake.  

Shortcuts enable your data teams to virtualize data in OneLake without moving or duplicating the data. We are thrilled to release the preview of shortcuts to the Google Cloud Platform. We are also announcing the ability to create shortcuts to cloud-based S3 compatible data sources, in preview, and on-premise S3 compatible data sources, coming soon. These sources include Cloudflare, Qumulo, MinIO, Dell ECS, and many more.

Last November, we shared a new, zero-ETL way of accessing and ingesting data seamlessly in near-real time from any database or data warehouse into the Data Warehousing experience in Fabric called Mirroring. We are thrilled to announce that Mirroring is now in preview, enabling Azure Cosmos Database, Azure SQL Database, and other database customers to mirror their data in OneLake and unlock all the capabilities of Fabric Data Warehouse, Direct Lake mode, notebooks, and much more. We are also offering a free terabyte of Mirroring storage for replicas for every capacity unit (CU) you have purchased and provisioned. For example, if you purchase F64, you will get sixty-four free terabytes worth of storage for your mirrored replicas. Learn more about these announcements by reading this blog. 

Finally, we are introducing an external data-sharing experience for Microsoft Fabric data and artifacts, helping make collaboration easier and more fruitful across organizations. Fabric external data sharing, coming soon, enables you to share data and assets with external organizations such as business partners, customers, and vendors in an easy, quick, and secure manner. Because this experience is built on top of OneLake’s shortcut capabilities, you can share data in place from OneLake storage locations without copying the data. External users can access it in their Fabric tenant, combine it with their data, and work with it across any Fabric experience and engine.

Fabric can empower every business user

The third promise we made was to empower every business user with approachable tools in Fabric to help turn data and insights into better decisions and more innovation. Power BI has been on the leading edge of helping every user access, explore, and take advantage of data with an intuitive interface and deep integration into the apps people use every day.

As part of our commitment to empowering every user, we are adding enhancements to the core Power BI visuals including more layout options for the matrix visual, additional formatting options for all cartesian charts, and new visual types like the button slicer and the new 100% stacked line area chart.

We are also introducing a metrics layer, in Fabric, coming soon, which allows organizations to create standardized business metrics, that are rooted in measures and are discoverable and intended for reuse. Trusted creators can select Power BI measures to promote to metrics and even, include descriptions, dimensions, and other metadata to help users better understand how they should be applied and interpreted. When looking through the metrics, users can preview and explore the simplified semantic model in a simple UI before using it in their solution. These metrics can not only be used in reports, scorecards, and Power BI solutions but also in other artifacts across Fabric, such as data science notebooks. 

We are also making it easier to connect to your data no matter where you are working. Later in the year, we will release the ability to live edit Direct Lake semantic models in the Fabric service right from Power BI Desktop, so you can work with data directly from OneLake. We are also enabling you to connect to over a hundred data sources and create paginated reports right from the Power BI Report Builder, now in preview. Also in preview is the new ability to create Power BI reports in the Fabric web service by simply connecting to your Excel and CSV files with relationship detection enabled. And to save you time when you are building reports, we have created new visuals for calculations we are introducing a new way for you to create and edit a custom date table without writing any Data Analysis Expressions (DAX) formulas, both in preview. Finally, you can generate mobile-optimized layouts for any report page, in preview, to help everyone view insights even on the go.

Fabric is AI-powered

Our fourth and final promise was to infuse generative AI capabilities into every layer of Fabric to help data teams accelerate their projects and focus on higher-value activities. With Copilot in Fabric, we are realizing that promise. The experiences currently in preview are already helping professionals go from raw data to insights in minutes. 

I am excited to share two important updates coming to Copilot in Fabric. In November, we announced a new feature called Explore that can help users learn more about their semantic model without building a report. We also announced another new feature called the DAX query view that helps you analyze and build your semantic model by running DAX queries. I’m excited to share we are making both of these capabilities even more powerful with Copilot. In Explore, we’ve added a new “Data overview” button which provides a summary, powered by Copilot, of the semantic model to help users get started. This feature will be released in preview in early April and will roll out to regions gradually. We are also adding the ability for Copilot to help you write and explain DAX queries in the DAX query view—now in preview.

Finally, we wanted to share a sneak peek of a new generative AI feature in Fabric that will enable custom Q&A experiences for your data. You can simply select the data source in Fabric you want to explore and immediately start asking questions about your data—even without any configuration. When answering questions, the generative AI experience will show the query it generated to find the answer and you can enhance the Q&A experience by adding more tables, setting additional context, and configuring settings. Data professionals can use this experience to learn more about their data or it could even be embedded into apps for business users to query.

Join us at Microsoft Build 

These announcements represent just the start of the innovation we are bringing to the Microsoft Fabric platform.

Join us at Microsoft Build from May 21^st-23^rd, 2024 either in person in Seattle, Washington, or online. You will hear and see our biggest announcements across the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform and the rest of Microsoft.

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric 

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric, consider: 

• Sign up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
• Visit the Microsoft Fabric website. 
• Join the Fabric community.  
• Read the Microsoft Fabric March 2024 Update blog and other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog. 
• Explore the Fabric technical documentation. 
• Learn more about Azure Innovate, our new offering to help you adopt AI. 
• Join the Fabric Partner Community on Teams to stay engaged with the Fabric partner and product teams and attend weekly Fabric Engineering Connection calls every Wednesday at 8 am PDT.  
• Check out the Fabric featured partners that have recent experience with deploying customer solutions on Fabric.

The post Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Sign up now to save your spot. Use the code MSCUST to take $100 off your registration.

Learn more on the latest with Microsoft Fabric

The Microsoft Fabric product team, customers, partners, and Microsoft MVPs will join me as we share our thoughts on the latest developments with analytics in the era of AI. You’ll get to deep dive into the latest features across Microsoft analytics, AI, databases, and our governance portfolio with workshops and sessions led by an impressive roster of community and Microsoft speakers. You can also connect—and reconnect—with Fabric community members and other Microsoft data users from around the world, building personal and professional relationships while learning from the success stories of your peers.

Here are some of the key topics that we’ll cover:

• Find out what’s new and what’s coming to Microsoft Fabric—and get ready to unify your data estate with this powerful, all-in-one analytics solution.
• Upskill your data teams with hands-on, role-specific training across the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, including in-depth sessions on Power BI, Synapse, Data Factory, Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Azure PostgreSQL DB, and Azure MySQL DB.
• Learn how Microsoft Purview can help you govern and secure your entire data estate to unlock value from your data faster.
• See how to combine Microsoft Fabric with Azure AI Studio to create innovative, generative AI-powered solutions. Learn how Copilot in Microsoft Fabric will change the way you and your teams work with data.
• Hear stories from our customers about how they have successfully used Fabric to modernize their analytics and enhance their data estates.
• Discover how you can combine these Microsoft solutions and your existing data solutions to accelerate innovation and prepare you for the age of AI.

You’ll also have the chance to meet and engage with other data professionals in the Community Lounge, where you can meet user group leaders, super users, student ambassadors, Microsoft MVPs, and other community members. Whether you are looking for a network to discuss a specific topic or are just wanting a moment to relax and chat, there will be a space for you. You can also join in the fun activities and games that will be organized throughout the event, such as trivia, bingo, and scavenger hunts.

Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024

Prepare for the era of AI with Microsoft Fabric

Sign up here

Additionally, you can take full advantage of our Ask the Experts area, where data, analytics, and AI specialists will tackle your burning technical questions. Whether you need help with a specific problem, want to learn a new technique, or just want to chat with someone who knows their stuff, you will find someone who can help you. The experts will include members of the community as well as Microsoft engineering and product teams, plus our Fabric Customer Advisory Team (CAT). They’ll be available throughout the event to assist you with any topic related to data and analytics.

There’s even more: Join our daily Interactive Learning Labs where we’ll have knowledgeable data professionals from the community on hand to assist you with real-world scenarios. These sessions are designed to help you learn new skills and explore new features in a hands-on environment.

You’ll also get the opportunity to participate in diversity, equity, and inclusion panels and sessions, where you can discuss the issues of today in a safe and welcoming environment. You will hear from diverse speakers who will share their stories, perspectives, and best practices on how to create a more inclusive and equitable data community. You’ll also learn how to support and empower others who are underrepresented or marginalized in the data field.

The team and I look forward to engaging with you all in-person in Las Vegas in March!

• Sign up now to save your spot. Use the code MSCUST to take $100 off your registration.

The post Register now for the first-ever Microsoft Fabric Community Conference appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Creating custom AI experiences requires data—lots of it. Data is the foundation on which AI is built and the simple fact is AI is only as good as the data it’s based on. As you enter a future built on AI, you need a data estate capable of fueling AI innovation across your organization. This can be a challenging prospect for most organizations whose data environments have grown organically over time with specialized and fragmented solutions.

That’s why we introduced Microsoft Fabric earlier this year. As Satya Nadella, CEO and Chairman of Microsoft, said at Microsoft Build 2023, Fabric is “perhaps the biggest launch of a data product from Microsoft since the launch of SQL Server.”

Microsoft Fabric has caught the imagination of our customers, partners, and community members. Since the preview announcement, 25,000 organizations around the world are already using Fabric today, including 67 percent of the Fortune 500. Most customers appreciate Fabric’s end-to-end value proposition, with 84 percent of companies using three or more workloads. Check out some of the early Fabric success stories with our customers:

Milliman 

“Microsoft Fabric would have been our choice from the beginning—had it only existed then. Building a democratized data platform was too big of a distraction from our focus on supporting actuaries in managing risk,”—Tom Peplow, Principal and Senior Director of Technology Strategy for Life Technology Solutions, Milliman. 

Watch Milliman’s transformation with Fabric. 

Zeiss 

“Previewing Fabric was a great opportunity to explore features right at the beginning and to think about how we could adopt them in our organization. We soon realized it was the natural evolution for us in our data mesh journey as it provided a complete analytics service in a single offering.”—Markus Morgner, Head of Enterprise Data Platform and Engineering, ZEISS Group.

Watch Zeiss’s transformation with Fabric.

Ernst and Young 

“In developing and launching EY Intelligence, Microsoft Fabric has been a game changer. Our unique analytics as a service offering gives the C-suite at our client organizations cross functional transparency and on demand insights to make better and quicker decisions,”—Swen Gehring, Director, Strategy and Transactions, Ernst and Young.

Watch Ernst and Young’s transformation with Fabric. 

Announcing the general availability of Microsoft Fabric

We are thrilled to announce Microsoft Fabric is now generally available for purchase. Microsoft Fabric can reshape how your teams work with data by bringing everyone together on a single, AI-powered platform built for the era of AI.

Watch a quick overview: 

See why we believe Microsoft Fabric will redefine the current analytics landscape:

Fabric is a complete analytics platform

Fabric combines the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory to create a single, unified software as a service (SaaS) platform with seven core workloads—each purpose-built for specific personas and specific tasks. By creating a single platform with tools for every data professional in a unified experience and architecture, Fabric can reduce the typical cost and effort of integrating analytics services and help simplify your data estate. Fabric’s unified architecture simplifies billing by providing a single pool of capacity and storage that is used for every workload. It also helps you manage and protect your data more effectively with end-to-end governance and security capabilities that work across your data in Microsoft Fabric and beyond. 

Fabric is lake-centric and open

Fabric’s unified, multi-cloud data lake, OneLake, is automatically wired into every Fabric workload and designed to help you simplify data management and reduce data duplication. OneLake shortcuts allow you to virtualize data into OneLake from across clouds, accounts, and domains, with sources like Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and Amazon S3—all without duplication, movement, or changes to metadata or ownership. Once enabled in OneLake, you can use domains and workspaces to organize your data into a logical data mesh and empower everyone to search across this mesh using an intuitive, personalized data hub. OneLake’s open data format means you only need to load the data into the lake once and you can use the single copy across every Fabric workload and engine, minimizing data duplication and sprawl. 

Fabric empowers every business user

Microsoft Fabric was built to help foster a data culture—enabling anyone to quickly go from data sitting in a lake to stunning Power BI visuals embedded in a Microsoft 365 app. You can more easily empower your business with capabilities like Real-Time Analytics, which can empower your teams with real-time insights with incredibly low latency. In addition, Direct Lake mode in Power BI allows users to create a real-time connection from your Power BI reports to your data in OneLake. This direct integration between Power BI and OneLake helps ensure only one copy of the data is ever created, helping you promote reuse of the best data for business users and avoid data fragmentation. This data can then easily and securely flow to the Microsoft 365 applications people use every day like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel and more to improve decision-making and drive impact. 

Fabric is AI-powered

We are infusing AI into every layer in Microsoft Fabric to help every data professional get more done, faster. With Copilot in Microsoft Fabric, you can use natural language to create dataflows and pipelines, write SQL statements, build reports, or even develop machine learning models. Today, we are excited to announce the public preview of Copilot in Fabric, starting with the Power BI, Data Factory, Data Engineering, and Data Science experiences. In Power BI, you can create stunning reports and summarize your insights into narrative summaries in seconds. In Data Factory, you can simply describe how you want to ingest and transform the data using natural language and Copilot does the rest. When working in a notebook in Data Engineering or Data Science, you can more quickly enrich, model, analyze, and explore their data. 

The preview of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric will be rolling out in stages, with the goal that customers with Fabric capacity (F64 or higher) or Power BI Premium capacity (P1 or higher) have access to the Copilot preview by the end of March 2024. You don’t need to sign up to join the preview, it will automatically become available to you as a new setting in the Fabric Admin Portal when it has rolled-out to your tenant. When charging begins for the Copilot in Fabric experiences, you can simply count Copilot usage against your existing Fabric or Power BI Premium capacity. Check out the Copilot in Fabric docs for complete instructions and requirements and don’t hesitate to contact your Microsoft representative, partner, or leave a comment in the Fabric Community site if you have any questions. 

Let’s take a look at the latest features and integrations we are announcing in each of these areas. 

Microsoft Fabric

Bring your data into the era of AI

Learn more

Complete analytics platform: Govern and protect your Fabric data

Over the past few years, organizations have seen a massive increase in their digital footprint, leading to data fragmentation, growth, and blind spots across their data estate. When we announced the preview of Microsoft Fabric, we shared an array of administration, governance, and security capabilities in Fabric to help provide visibility across your tenant, insights into usage and adoption, and tools to secure and govern your data end-to-end.

We are now announcing an expansion of these governance and security capabilities through tighter integration with Microsoft Purview. In Fabric, you can now manually apply Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels to classify sensitive Fabric data—a familiar concept to the millions of Microsoft 365 users who employ these labels every day. We’ve also simplified audits by automatically capturing user and system operations in Microsoft Purview audit logs. Both sensitivity labels, and the audit integration are now generally available.

In addition to integrating Purview data security and compliance capabilities throughout Fabric, we are also infusing Fabric artifacts into the Microsoft Purview Data Map. The Data Map is automatically provisioned and attached to every Fabric instance by default; no set-up required. You can browse and search your Fabric and other assets across your data estate in the Microsoft Purview Data Catalog. For easy access to all these Purview capabilities, we’ve created a centralized page called the Purview Hub, currently in public preview, which serves as a gateway to Purview and contains insights into item inventory, sensitive data, and endorsement. Read the Fabric GA announcement blog to read about these features in more detail.

Lake-centric and open: Seamlessly connect your data sources to Fabric

The modern data estate spans multiple clouds, accounts, databases, domains, and engines, making it hard to gain insights from your data. With Microsoft Fabric, we’ve simplified how you bring data into OneLake through two key Fabric capabilities: Shortcuts and a new data replication capability called Mirroring.

Shortcuts enable your data teams to virtualize data in OneLake without having to move and duplicate it. You can use shortcuts to combine your data—spread across different clouds, accounts, lines of businesses, and domains—into a virtualized data product tailored to your specific needs. We are excited to announce the general availability of shortcuts for OneLake, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Amazon S3, and Microsoft Dataverse. Furthermore, we’ve added features like “Link to Microsoft Fabric” in Power Apps that directly link Dynamics 365 and Power Platform data to Fabric. These links empower low-code app builders to quickly explore their data and drive action from insights.

We are also excited to announce Mirroring, a new, frictionless way to add and manage existing cloud data warehouses and databases in Fabric’s Synapse Data Warehouse experience. Mirroring replicates a snapshot of the database to OneLake in Delta Parquet tables and keeps the replica in sync in near real time. Once the source database is attached, features like shortcuts, Direct Lake mode in Power BI, and our universal security model work instantly. We will soon enable Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL DB, Snowflake, and Mongo DB customers to use mirroring to access their data in OneLake, with more data sources coming in 2024.

Finally, we are also making it easier to analyze the vast amount of work data you have in Microsoft 365 with native integration into Microsoft Graph, the unified data model for products like Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, Viva Insights, and more. Previously, Microsoft 365 data was only offered in JSON format, but it’s now also offered in Delta Parquet format for easy integration into OneLake.

With your data in OneLake, you can use domains, sub domains, and workspaces to organize your data into a logical data mesh. Doing so allows for federated governance and granular control while empowering everyone to find data using an intuitive, personalized data hub. Learn more about how you can optimize your data organization in OneLake here.

Empower every business user to work with data

Fostering a culture that empowers everyone to work with data and find data-driven answers to their questions is a vision shared by organizations around the world. And you can see why when data-driven organizations continually out-perform their counterparts. Organizations often start with business intelligence (BI) tools like Power BI which can provide the business with powerful insights and visuals. But achieving this vision requires more than just the right BI tool; it requires a well-orchestrated data estate that minimizes data fragmentation and makes it easy for business users to find continually up-to-date, accurate data. By combining Power BI and OneLake, your data estate finally has the tools you need to realize the goals of your data culture.

In May 2023, we announced Direct Lake mode in Power BI, now generally available, which provides a blazing fast, real-time connection to your data—ensuring only one copy of the data is created and your report is always up to date. We are announcing an expansion of Direct Lake mode to support Power BI semantic models on Fabric Warehouses, generally available, and stored credentials for Direct Lake semantic models, in public preview. Stored credentials will enable you to apply row-level security (RLS) on Direct Lake datasets, ensuring users can only access the data for which they are authorized. For those working with import-mode semantic models using the large semantic model storage, we are announcing the public preview of OneLake integration—enabling you to add your import-mode semantic models to OneLake and use it with other Fabric workloads.

Beyond enhancing our connection with OneLake, we are also announcing a set of new tools that make it even easier for business users to uncover the insights they need. This includes the public preview of Explore, a new feature that helps you learn more about your semantic model without building a report and DAX Query View which provides BI developers with an easier way to use DAX queries. You can learn more about all these announcements by reading the Power BI at Ignite blog.

AI-powered: Prepare your data for game-changing AI

Generative AI represents not just the next generation of AI, but one of the biggest changes in computing in the last decade. As Satya Nadella put it at Microsoft Build 2023, “We went from the bicycle to the steam engine with the launch of ChatGPT.” Turn-key AI solutions like Copilot are already having an immediate impact on the productivity of adopters by helping them focus on higher value activities. As mentioned above, we are thrilled to announce that Copilot in Microsoft Fabric is now in public preview, including the experiences for Power BI, Data Factory, Data Science, and Data Engineering. Learn more about Copilot in Fabric here.

However, these out-of-the-box solutions are only the beginning of the benefits generative AI can have on your organization. Organization-specific, or even team-specific, use cases can help your employees scale in amazing ways. These custom experiences require two key ingredients: a data platform that can help you unify, prepare, and model your data and an AI platform that can utilize this data with break-through AI models. Microsoft now has the ideal answer to both requirements: Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI Studio. The recently announced Azure AI Studio, in public preview, is a one-stop-shop to seamlessly explore, build, evaluate, and deploy AI solutions using state-of-the-art AI tools and machine learning models, grounded in responsible AI practices.

We are thrilled to announce the seamless integration between Azure AI Studio and Microsoft Fabric—powering a new era in AI-driven innovation. With this potent combination, you can confidently build AI solutions and custom models in Azure AI Studio using data integrated and cleaned in Microsoft Fabric. In Azure AI Studio, developers can run models against data from OneLake and any other data supported by Fabric shortcuts, including Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 and Amazon S3. Azure AI Search can store, index, and retrieve data, including vector embeddings, from any of these sources through OneLake. Learn more about this integration in the Azure AI Studio and Microsoft Fabric blog.

Maximize your existing Microsoft analytics investments

Existing Azure Synapse Analytics customers

The next generation of Azure Synapse Analytics has fueled the creation of Microsoft Fabric. With this solid foundation, we can empower new, unprecedented ways of deploying pipelines, data warehousing, data engineering, data science, and real-time analytics technologies to simplify and increase the efficiency of your solutions. But what does this mean if you are an existing Azure Synapse Analytics customer?

We will continue to fully support the Azure Synapse Analytics platform as a service (PaaS) product. This includes supporting our users fixing product bugs, and not compromising the security of the platform in any way. You can continue to deploy, operate, and expand your Azure Synapse Analytics solution. 

However, you’ve likely already started thinking about a Microsoft Fabric future for your analytics solutions. To help you on this journey, we’ve published an end-to-end guide to Fabric blog for existing Synapse customers to help you plan your upgrade strategy of your current workloads.

Existing Azure Databricks customers

We believe the future of analytics and AI applications is built on an open and governed lakehouse foundation, enabling you to combine the best elements of data lakes and data warehouses. That’s why Microsoft Fabric embraces an open and governed lakehouse as the underlying SaaS storage, standardizing on Delta Parquet format—the same format our Azure Databricks customers use today.

This means Azure Databricks customers can seamlessly choose the analytics capabilities from Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, and other Azure products that work best for their scenarios, without the pain of integration. Using the ADLS Gen2 shortcut, you can bring your Azure Databricks data into OneLake without copying the data.

With that data in OneLake, an easy first use case is to use Direct Lake mode in Power BI to create a blazing fast, real-time connection to your Databricks data for your BI reports. And as a first party offering, Azure Databricks customers have easy access and native integration to many other Azure services—on top of the same open and governed lakehouse—reducing data estate fragmentation. You can learn more during the Microsoft Ignite 2023 session I am delivering, “Make your data AI ready with Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks.”

Go further with partners

As always, you don’t have to do this alone. Our top global partners, Accenture and Capgemini have over 4,200 individuals trained on Microsoft Fabric and are ready to help you meet your analytics goals.

“At Accenture and Avanade, we are ready to securely unify data, analytics, and AI for our clients with Microsoft Fabric. We have launched the Microsoft Fabric University that already has trained 3,000 data professionals to be fluent in Fabric, and we are taking lessons learned from building our own operations on Fabric to accelerate AI opportunities with our clients across the globe.”—Simon Thomas, Data and AI Global Lead for Avanade. 

“Through our strategic partnership and the transformative capabilities of Microsoft Fabric, we are accelerating data value creation for our customers. Capgemini’s investment in scaling Fabric competency is paving the way for excellence through our Fabric-specific assessment and certification via Capgemini’s OCEANS Tool, provides enterprises with the opportunity to unleash unified data and drive their organizations forward.”—Niraj Parihar, Insights and Data CEO of Capgemini.

With the surge of customer demand for Fabric, many partners have already completed the first wave of pilot projects during preview—helping customers unlock the early potential of Fabric. Our Microsoft engineering team worked closely with these partners to enhance their capacity and capabilities on Fabric, ensuring the successful delivery of customer implementations.

For example, Microsoft partner SDK Tek Services Ltd. implemented a Fabric solution with Regional Oil Sands Operating Alliance that reduced their data compilation time by 85 percent, enabling them to focus on their core business instead of managing data. In another project, Sonata Software worked with Alltech to empower their business users with self-service access to analytics and to remove the burden on their IT department. You can find more Fabric partners and their stories featured on Fabric partner website.

As a sample, here are some of the partners that successfully completed customer pilot project(s) on Fabric. Each of these partners are well positioned to drive meaningful business outcomes with Microsoft Fabric:

Learn more about the Fabric momentum driven by services partners in our Fabric Partner blog.

Join the ISV community building on Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric was created with ISVs in mind—built from the ground up to be extensible and open at every level. Fabric provides a rich set of capabilities that allow ISVs to accelerate their application development and create disruptive industry-leading offerings. This includes a new public preview, Fabric REST API that enables ISVs and our users to build custom applications, integrated systems, and automate deployment of environments within Fabric.

As an example, the London Stock Exchange Group, a leading provider of financial markets infrastructure, are adding their technology to Microsoft Fabric to give their customers easier data discovery and access, greater interoperability, and cost-effective digital rights management. Esri, a leading geographic information system (GIS) software company, have combined their industry-leading spatial analytics, powered by their ArcGIS, with Microsoft Fabric to accelerate time to insights and reveal unexplored patterns, trends, and connections for customers. SAS have infused their Intelligent Decisioning analytics technology with Microsoft Fabric to drive real-time interactions and define the next best actions at scale, providing unprecedented ability to automate decisions across the enterprise.

Learn more about the vibrant ecosystem of ISVs building on Fabric.

Get started with Microsoft Fabric

New customers can try out everything Fabric has to offer by signing up for afree 60-day trial—no credit card information required. To start your free trial, sign up for a free account (Power BI customers can use their existing account), and once signed in, select start trial within the account manager tool in the Fabric app. Existing Power BI Premium customers can already access Microsoft Fabric by simply turning on Fabric in their Fabric admin portal. Learn more on the Fabric get started page.

If you are considering purchasing Fabric, there is a selection of pricing options to help you minimize your cost and maximize your return. In June 2023, we announced pay-as-you-go prices for Fabric that allow you to dynamically scale up or scale down and pause capacity as needed. We are excited to announce reservation pricing for Fabric that will allow you to pre-commit Fabric Capacity Units in one-year increments, helping you save up to 40.5 percent over the pay-as-you-go prices (excluding Power BI Capacity SKUs). You can pay for all your consumption, across every Fabric workload, with a single, unified bill and use the Capacity Metrics app to understand and track your usage. We are also announcing OneLake BCDR and cache storage prices, expanding on our already announced OneLake storage pricing. Check out all these pricing options on the Microsoft Fabric pricing page. 

With these announcements, current Power BI Premium per capacity customers have an additional pricing option to experience everything Fabric has to offer. Along with the pay-as-you-go option, Fabric customers also enjoy smaller compute SKUs that start far below the entry level P-SKU. And since Fabric SKUs are eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), Fabric customers can deprecate their Fabric spend against their MACC commitment.

Join us at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

If you would like to gain hands-on experience with Microsoft Fabric and learn directly from the people who created it, join us from March 24-29, 2024 at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference. We will bring together experts from Microsoft and the global analytics community to share, demo, and discuss the latest developments in Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, and more. At this event, you will be able to learn from top data experts and AI leaders while having the chance to interact with your peers and share your story. We hope you will join us and see how cutting-edge technologies from Microsoft can enable your business success with the power of Microsoft Fabric. Register today.

Build the skills you need to take full advantage of Microsoft Fabric

We’re announcing an enhanced portfolio of Microsoft Credentials, including the new “Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate” certification along with several new Microsoft Applied Skills covering scenarios using Microsoft Fabric, like implementing lakehouses, data warehouses, and real-time analytics solutions. These credentials are coming in the next months.

Ready to dive into Fabric and start preparing for these credentials? Take the “Microsoft Fabric Challenge” as part of the Microsoft Learn Cloud Skills Challenge, Ignite edition. Skill up for in-demand technical scenarios and enter to win a VIP event pass for the next Microsoft Ignite or Microsoft Build. Terms and conditions apply. See official rules for more details. The challenge is available now through January 15, 2024, so get started now to avoid missing a beat.

Engage with a vibrant community of data professionals to get all your Fabric questions answered, suggest new features, stay current on the latest updates, and so much more.

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric, consider:

• Signing up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
• Visiting the Microsoft Fabric website.
• Watch the Microsoft Fabric Ignite sessions. 
• Reading more in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.
• Exploring the Fabric technical documentation.
• Attending the Supercharge organizational analytics and democratize insights webinar to get an end-to-end view of Microsoft Fabric.
• Joining the Fabric community. 
• Learning more about Azure Innovate, our new offering to help you adopt AI. 

The post Prepare your data for AI innovation with Microsoft Fabric—now generally available appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Generative AI and language model services, such as Azure OpenAI Service, are enabling customers to use and create everyday AI experiences that are reinventing how employees spend their time. Powering organization-specific AI experiences requires a constant supply of clean data from a well-managed and highly integrated analytics system. However, most organizations’ analytics systems are a labyrinth of specialized and disconnected services.  

And it’s no wonder given the massively fragmented data and AI technology market with hundreds of vendors and thousands of services. Customers must stitch together a complex set of disconnected services from multiple vendors themselves and incur the costs and burdens of making these services function together. 

Introducing Microsoft Fabric 

Today we are unveiling Microsoft Fabric—an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need. Fabric integrates technologies like Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI into a single unified product, empowering data and business professionals alike to unlock the potential of their data and lay the foundation for the era of AI. 

Watch a quick overview:  

What sets Microsoft Fabric apart? 

Fabric is an end-to-end analytics product that addresses every aspect of an organization’s analytics needs. But there are five areas that really set Fabric apart from the rest of the market:

1. Fabric is a complete analytics platform 

Every analytics project has multiple subsystems. Every subsystem needs a different array of capabilities, often requiring products from multiple vendors. Integrating these products can be a complex, fragile, and expensive endeavor.  

With Fabric, customers can use a single product with a unified experience and architecture that provides all the capabilities required for a developer to extract insights from data and present it to the business user. By delivering the experience as software as a service (SaaS), everything is automatically integrated and optimized, and users can sign up within seconds and get real business value within minutes.  

Fabric empowers every team in the analytics process with the role-specific experiences they need, so data engineers, data warehousing professionals, data scientists, data analysts, and business users feel right at home.  

Fabric comes with seven core workloads: 

• Data Factory (preview) provides more than 150 connectors to cloud and on-premises data sources, drag-and-drop experiences for data transformation, and the ability to orchestrate data pipelines.
• Synapse Data Engineering (preview) enables great authoring experiences for Spark, instant start with live pools, and the ability to collaborate.
• Synapse Data Science (preview) provides an end-to-end workflow for data scientists to build sophisticated AI models, collaborate easily, and train, deploy, and manage machine learning models. 
• Synapse Data Warehousing (preview) provides a converged lake house and data warehouse experience with industry-leading SQL performance on open data formats.
• Synapse Real-Time Analytics (preview) enables developers to work with data streaming in from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, telemetry, logs, and more, and analyze massive volumes of semi-structured data with high performance and low latency.
• Power BI in Fabric provides industry-leading visualization and AI-driven analytics that enable business analysts and business users to gain insights from data. The Power BI experience is also deeply integrated into Microsoft 365, providing relevant insights where business users already work.  
• Data Activator (coming soon) provides real-time detection and monitoring of data and can trigger notifications and actions when it finds specified patterns in data—all in a no-code experience. 

You can try these experiences today by signing up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial. 

2. Fabric is lake-centric and open 

Today’s data lakes can be messy and complicated, making it hard for customers to create, integrate, manage, and operate data lakes. Once they are operational, multiple data products using different proprietary data formats on the same data lake can cause significant data duplication and concerns about vendor lock-in.  

OneLake—The OneDrive for data 

Fabric comes with a SaaS, multi-cloud data lake called OneLake that is built-in and automatically available to every Fabric tenant. All Fabric workloads are automatically wired into OneLake, just like all Microsoft 365 applications are wired into OneDrive. Data is organized in an intuitive data hub, and automatically indexed for discovery, sharing, governance, and compliance.  

OneLake serves developers, business analysts, and business users alike, helping eliminate pervasive and chaotic data silos created by different developers provisioning and configuring their own isolated storage accounts. Instead, OneLake provides a single, unified storage system for all developers, where discovery and sharing of data are easy with policy and security settings enforced centrally. At the API layer, OneLake is built on and fully compatible with Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLSg2), instantly tapping into ADLSg2’s vast ecosystem of applications, tools, and developers.  

A key capability of OneLake is “Shortcuts.” OneLake allows easy sharing of data between users and applications without having to move and duplicate information unnecessarily. Shortcuts allow OneLake to virtualize data lake storage in ADLSg2, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Google Storage (coming soon), enabling developers to compose and analyze data across clouds. 

Open data formats across analytics offerings 

Fabric is deeply committed to open data formats across all its workloads and tiers. Fabric treats Delta on top of Parquet files as a native data format that is the default for all workloads. This deep commitment to a common open data format means that customers need to load the data into the lake only once and all the workloads can operate on the same data, without having to separately ingest it. It also means that OneLake supports structured data of any format and unstructured data, giving customers total flexibility.  

By adopting OneLake as our store and Delta and Parquet as the common format for all workloads, we offer customers a data stack that’s unified at the most fundamental level. Customers do not need to maintain different copies of data for databases, data lakes, data warehousing, business intelligence, or real-time analytics. Instead, a single copy of the data in OneLake can directly power all the workloads.  

Managing data security (table, column, and row levels) across different data engines can be a persistent nightmare for customers. Fabric will provide a universal security model that is managed in OneLake, and all engines enforce it uniformly as they process queries and jobs. This model is coming soon.  

3. Fabric is powered by AI  

We are infusing Fabric with Azure OpenAI Service at every layer to help customers unlock the full potential of their data, enabling developers to leverage the power of generative AI against their data and assisting business users to find insights in their data. With Copilot in Microsoft Fabric in every data experience, users can use conversational language to create dataflows and data pipelines, generate code and entire functions, build machine learning models, or visualize results. Customers can even create their own conversational language experiences that combine Azure OpenAI Service models and their data and publish them as plug-ins.   

Copilot in Microsoft Fabric builds on our existing commitments to data security and privacy in the enterprise. Copilot inherits an organization’s security, compliance, and privacy policies. Microsoft does not use organizations’ tenant data to train the base language models that power Copilot. 

Copilot in Microsoft Fabric will be coming soon. Stay tuned to the Microsoft Fabric blog for the latest updates and public release date for Copilot in Microsoft Fabric.  

4. Fabric empowers every business user 

Customers aspire to drive a data culture where everyone in their organization is making better decisions based on data. To help our customers foster this culture, Fabric deeply integrates with the Microsoft 365 applications people use every day.  

Power BI is a core part of Fabric and is already infused across Microsoft 365. Through Power BI’s deep integrations with popular applications such as Excel, Microsoft Teams, PowerPoint, and SharePoint, relevant data from OneLake is easily discoverable and accessible to users right from Microsoft 365—helping customers drive more value from their data

With Fabric, you can turn your Microsoft 365 apps into hubs for uncovering and applying insights. For example, users in Microsoft Excel can directly discover and analyze data in OneLake and generate a Power BI report with a click of a button. In Teams, users can infuse data into their everyday work with embedded channels, chat, and meeting experiences. Business users can bring data into their presentations by embedding live Power BI reports directly in Microsoft PowerPoint. Power BI is also natively integrated with SharePoint, enabling easy sharing and dissemination of insights. With Microsoft Graph Data Connect (preview), Microsoft 365 data is natively integrated into OneLake so customers can unlock insights on their customer relationships, business processes, security and compliance, and people productivity.  

5. Fabric reduces costs through unified capacities 

Today’s analytics systems typically combine products from multiple vendors in a single project. This results in computing capacity provisioned in multiple systems like data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, and business intelligence. When one of the systems is idle, its capacity cannot be used by another system causing significant wastage.  

Purchasing and managing resources is massively simplified with Fabric. Customers can purchase a single pool of computing that powers all Fabric workloads. With this all-inclusive approach, customers can create solutions that leverage all workloads freely without any friction in their experience or commerce. The universal compute capacities significantly reduce costs, as any unused compute capacity in one workload can be utilized by any of the workloads. 

Explore how our customers are already using Microsoft Fabric  

Ferguson 

Ferguson is a leading distributor of plumbing, HVAC, and waterworks supplies, operating across North America. By using Fabric to consolidate their analytics stack into a unified solution, they are hoping to reduce their delivery time and improve efficiency. 

“Microsoft Fabric reduces the delivery time by removing the overhead of using multiple disparate services. By consolidating the necessary data provisioning, transformation, modeling, and analysis services into one UI, the time from raw data to business intelligence is significantly reduced. Fabric meaningfully impacts Ferguson’s data storage, engineering, and analytics groups since all these workloads can now be done in the same UI for faster delivery of insights.”—George Rasco, Principal Database Architect, Ferguson

See Fabric in action at Ferguson: 

T-Mobile 

T-Mobile, one of the largest providers of wireless communications services in the United States, is focused on driving disruption that creates innovation and better customer experiences in wireless and beyond. With Fabric, T-Mobile hopes they can take their platform and data-driven decision-making to the next level. 

“T-Mobile loves our customers and providing them with new Un-Carrier benefits! We think that Fabric’s upcoming abilities will help us eliminate data silos, making it easier for us to unlock new insights into how we show our customers even more love. Querying across the lakehouse and warehouse from a single engine—that’s a game changer. Spark compute on-demand, rather than waiting for clusters to spin up, is a huge improvement for both standard data engineering and advanced analytics. It saves three minutes on every job, and when you’re running thousands of jobs an hour, that really adds up. And being able to easily share datasets across the company is going to eliminate so much data duplication. We’re really looking forward to these new features.”—Geoffrey Freeman, MTS, Data Solutions and Analytics, T-Mobile

Aon  

Aon provides professional services and management consulting services to a vast global network of customers. With the help of Fabric, Aon hopes that they can consolidate more of their current technology stack and focus on adding more value to their clients. 

“What’s most exciting to me about Fabric is simplifying our existing analytics stack. Currently, there are so many different PaaS services across the board that when it comes to modernization efforts for many developers, Fabric helps simplify that. We can now spend less time building infrastructure and more time adding value to our business.”—Boby Azarbod, Data Services Lead, Aon

What happens to current Microsoft analytics solutions? 

Existing Microsoft products such as Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Data Explorer will continue to provide a robust, enterprise-grade platform as a service (PaaS) solution for data analytics. Fabric represents an evolution of those offerings in the form of a simplified SaaS solution that can connect to existing PaaS offerings. Customers will be able to upgrade from their current products into Fabric at their own pace.  

Get started with Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is currently in preview. Try out everything Fabric has to offer by signing up for the free trial—no credit card information is required. Everyone who signs up gets a fixed Fabric trial capacity, which may be used for any feature or capability from integrating data to creating machine learning models. Existing Power BI Premium customers can simply turn on Fabric through the Power BI admin portal. After July 1, 2023, Fabric will be enabled for all Power BI tenants. 

Microsoft Fabric resources 

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric, consider:  

• Signing up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
• Visiting the Microsoft Fabric website.
• Reading the more in-depth Fabric experience announcement blogs:
  • Data Factory experience in Fabric blog
  • Synapse Data Engineering experience in Fabric blog
  • Synapse Data Science experience in Fabric blog
  • Synapse Data Warehousing experience in Fabric blog
  • Synapse Real-Time Analytics experience in Fabric blog
  • Power BI announcement blog
  • Data Activator experience in Fabric blog
  • Administration and governance in Fabric blog
  • OneLake in Fabric blog
  • Fabric event streams blog
  • Microsoft 365 data integration in Fabric blog
  • Dataverse and Microsoft Fabric integration blog
• Exploring the Fabric technical documentation.
• Reading the free e-book on getting started with Fabric. 
• Exploring Fabric through the Guided Tour.
• Join the Fabric community to post your questions, share your feedback, and learn from others. 
• Explore Let us know what you think of Azure and what you would like to see in the future. Provide feedback
• Build your cloud computing and Azure skills with free courses by Microsoft Learn. Explore Azure learning

The post Introducing Microsoft Fabric: Data analytics for the era of AI appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.