Learn more about FabCon and SQLCon 2026
The excitement surrounding this event reflects the same momentum we’re seeing across our data portfolio. Just two and a half years after Microsoft Fabric reached general availability, it’s already serving more than 31,000 customers and remains the fastest-growing data platform in Microsoft’s history. Fortune 500 companies like The Coca-Cola Company are already using Fabric at scale across their organizations.

Microsoft Fabric is helping us evolve our data foundation into a more unified, AI-ready platform. Combined with Power BI and capabilities like Fabric IQ, it enables the enterprise to turn data into intelligence and act on it faster.

Shekhar Gowda, Vice President of Global Marketing Technologies at The Coca-Cola Company
Our databases are accelerating just as quickly, with SQL Server 2025 growing more than twice as fast as the previous version.

Today, we’re thrilled to share how we are bringing the power of databases and Fabric together to form a truly converged data platform—one that unifies transactional, operational, and analytical data under a single, consistent architecture. I’ll also highlight how we’ve enhanced Fabric to help you transform data into the semantic knowledge AI needs to understand your business, powered by Fabric IQ and Power BI’s industry-leading semantic model technology.

Introducing the Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric
Databases sit at the heart of the enterprise data estate—a system of record powering applications, transactions, and mission‑critical insights. Yet as organizations scale across cloud, on‑premises, and edge environments, database estates have become increasingly fragmented and isolated. As AI places even greater demands on data estates, unifying databases under a single access point and control plane has become essential.

To address this challenge, Fabric is expanding its role as the central access point for enterprise data with the Database Hub in Fabric, now available in early access. Database Hub in Fabric provides a unified database management experience that brings together databases across edge, cloud, and Fabric into a single, coherent view. Teams now have one place to explore, observe, govern, and optimize their entire database estate—including Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, SQL Server (enabled by Azure Arc), Azure Database for MySQL, and Fabric Databases—without changing how each service is deployed.

Built for scale, the Database Hub in Fabric introduces an agent‑assisted, human-in-the loop approach to database management. With built-in observability, delegated governance, and Microsoft Copilot-powered insights, teams can deploy intelligent agents to continuously reason over estate‑wide signals and surface what changed, explain why it matters, and guide teams toward what to do next. The result is a simpler, more confident way to manage databases at scale. Over time, this model enables database estates to become more proactive, resilient, and intelligent, laying the foundation for greater autonomy, while keeping humans firmly in control of goals, boundaries, and trust.

Learn more about Database Hub in Fabric and what’s new across Databases
Bringing databases together under a single management layer is a critical step as you prepare your estates for AI at scale. But it’s not the end of the journey. The challenge shifts from where data lives to how data is understood, connected, and activated across the enterprise.

Getting your data estate ready for AI with Fabric
As organizations move from traditional applications to AI‑powered, multi‑agent systems, the advantage is shifting away from the specific model you deploy. It now lies in the intelligence and context that allow agents to understand how your business is run, the state of your business, and your institutional knowledge to help take meaningful action.

This is the challenge Microsoft IQ is designed to address. Unlike point solutions on the market today, Microsoft IQ provides an intelligence layer that delivers shared, enterprise-grade business context to every agent. That context is built from three complementary sources: productivity signals from Work IQ, institutional knowledge from Foundry IQ, and live business data from Fabric IQ.

However, like the database layer, while the IQ context layer is a critical part of a successful, and healthy AI foundation, it is not the full story. Building a complete AI-ready data foundation requires investing in four core steps:

Unifying your data estate to eliminate silos and reduce architectural complexity.
Processing and harmonizing data so it becomes AI-ready, clean, connected, and structured for both operational and analytical use.
Curating semantic meaning to give agents contextual understanding, enabling them to interpret data the way your teams already do. This is where Microsoft IQ comes into play.
Empowering AI agents to act, applying that context to automate workflows, accelerate decisions, and transform operations end‑to‑end.
Unifying your data estate with Microsoft OneLake
Every AI initiative starts with the same fundamental challenge: understanding where your data lives and how to bring it together. Microsoft OneLake was built to solve that problem by unifying data across clouds, on-premises environments, and third-party platforms into a single logical data lake without unnecessary extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL), fragmentation, or duplicated copies.

Are my agents hunting for data?

Watch the podcast
Connecting to more sources than ever before
Today, we’re expanding Mirroring in Fabric to support even more systems our customers rely on. Mirroring for SharePoint lists and Dremio are now in preview with Azure Monitor coming soon, while mirroring for Oracle and SAP Datasphere are generally available—all of which are available as part of the core mirroring capabilities. We are also introducing extended capabilities in mirroring designed to help you operationalize mirrored sources at scale, including Change Data Feed (CDF) and the ability to create views on top of mirrored data, starting with Snowflake. Extended capabilities for mirroring will be offered as a paid option.

Shortcut transformations are also now generally available, allowing data to be shaped automatically as it connects to or moves within OneLake. You can convert formats such as Excel to Delta tables, now in preview, and apply AI-powered transformations.

Additionally, we are continuing to invest in open interoperability, ensuring OneLake works seamlessly with the platforms organizations already use. We are excited to announce the ability to natively read from OneLake through Azure Databricks Unity Catalog is now in public preview. We also recently announced the general availability of our interoperability with Snowflake.

I’m also excited to share that Auger, a rapidly growing supply chain platform designed to bring intelligence and automation to global operations, has built its platform on Fabric, with all data stored natively in OneLake. This architecture enables Auger customers to seamlessly access their operations data through OneLake shortcuts within their own Fabric environments and use the full power of the platform including Power BI, Fabric data agents, and more. Learn more in my blog, co-authored with Auger Chief Executive Officer Dave Clark.

Protect your data with OneLake security, now generally available
Security and governance remain foundational to OneLake. I’m thrilled to announce OneLake security will be generally available in the coming weeks, enabling data owners to define roles, enforce row- and column-level controls, and manage permissions through a single unified model that follows the data.

To learn more about these announcements, read the OneLake blog and the Fabric Data Factory blog.

Processing and harmonizing data with Fabric analytics
AI agents are only as reliable as the data you feed them. Before data can train or ground an agent, it must be integrated, cleaned, and structured, so the agent operates from consistent, trusted information. With industry-leading engines in Fabric like Spark, T-SQL, KQL, and Analysis Services, we can equip data teams to do exactly that.

Now, we are expanding these capabilities with the introduction of Runtime 2.0 in preview, purpose-built for large-scale data computation. It incorporates Apache Spark 4.x, Delta Lake 4.x, Scala 2.13, and Azure Linux Mariner 3.0 to power advanced enterprise workloads. Materialized lake views are also now generally available, simplifying medallion architecture implementation in Spark SQL and PySpark and enabling always up-to-date pipelines with no manual orchestration. In addition, a new agentic Copilot experience in notebooks delivers deeper context awareness, reasoning over your workspace, and generating code with greater speed and precision.

For real-time scenarios, we’re launching Microsoft Fabric Maps into general availability. Maps add geospatial context to your agents and operations by turning large volumes of location-based data into interactive, real-time visual insights.

For a comprehensive overview of these announcements and much more, read the Fabric Analytics announcement blog and the Fabric Real-Time Intelligence announcement blog.

Creating semantic meaning with Fabric IQ
Preparing raw data for AI is essential. The next step is transforming that data into meaningful, unified business context. That is where Fabric IQ comes in.

Fabric IQ unifies analytical data and operational data, including telemetry, time series, graph, and geospatial data, within a shared semantic framework of business entities, relationships, properties, rules, and actions. Instead of thinking in terms of tables and schemas, your teams and agents can operate on this framework, or ontology, aligned to how the business actually runs.

Fabric IQ ontologies will soon become accessible through an MCP server in preview, enabling agents to discover, understand, and act on this semantic layer. Ontologies can also serve as context sources for maps and soon in operations agents in Fabric, extending shared business context directly into operational decision-making and execution.

We are also excited to announce planning in Fabric IQ, a new enterprise planning capability that enables organizations to create plans, budgets, forecasts, and scenario models directly on top of Fabric’s semantic models. By complementing Fabric IQ’s ontologies with integrated planning, you get a complete, contextual view of your historical, real-time, and forward planning data. This allows users and agents to quickly answer what has happened, what is happening, and what should happen all from a single source. See this in action:

Finally, we recently announced a strategic partnership with NVIDIA to power the next generation of Physical AI by integrating Real-Time Intelligence and Fabric IQ with NVIDIA Omniverse libraries. The combined platform unifies real‑time operational data, business semantics, and physical simulation to enable organizations to optimize their physical operations in scenarios like intelligent digital twins, predictive maintenance, autonomous logistics, and energy optimization.

To learn more about all of our partner announcements, read the Fabric ISV announcement blog and the planning in Fabric IQ blog.

Enhancing the underlying Fabric IQ technology
Powering much of Fabric IQ’s rich experience is a combination of Power BI’s industry-leading, rich semantic model technology and graph in Fabric, our highly scalable graph database. Already delivering insights to more than 35 million active users, semantic models provide the ideal foundation for training agents through Fabric IQ. Now, with the general availability of Direct Lake on OneLake, your tables can be read directly from OneLake with native security enforcement, richer cross-item modeling, and import-class performance without data movement or refresh.

I’m also excited to share that graph in Fabric will be generally available in the coming weeks, enabling teams to visualize and query complex relationships across customers, partners, and supply chains.

To learn more, check out the Fabric IQ announcement blog and the Power BI announcement blog.

Empowering agents to act with Fabric data and operations agents
Frontier organizations are moving beyond general-purpose assistants and instead, adopting multi-agent systems composed of specialized agents. These agents are each grounded on specific data and reusable across different systems, allowing you to deliver more accurate, accelerated, and scalable outcomes.

To support your multi-agent systems, Fabric comes with built-in agent creation capabilities with Fabric data agents and operations agents. I’m excited to share that Fabric data agents are now generally available. Fabric data agents can be thought of as virtual analysts, aligned to specific domain data to support deeper analysis and deliver insights. Operations agents complement them by monitoring real-time data, detecting patterns, and taking proactive action.

Check out a quick demo of operations agents in Fabric:

These agents can be used across Fabric or as foundational knowledge sources in leading AI tools like Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio or even Microsoft 365 Copilot. To learn more about our AI announcements, check out the Fabric analytics blog covering data agents and the Fabric IQ blog covering operations agents.

Building mission-critical applications with developer experiences in Fabric
Developers building the next generation of AI applications need a comprehensive, cost-effective data platform that’s already integrated with your existing tools and workflows. Today, we are expanding Fabric’s developer tooling to meet that demand.

First, Fabric Model Context Protocol (MCP) is advancing with two major milestones. Fabric local MCP is now generally available, providing an open-source local server that connects AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot directly to Fabric. Alongside this, we’re introducing the public preview of Fabric remote MCP, a secure, cloud‑hosted execution engine that enables AI agents and automation tools to perform authenticated actions in Fabric.

We’re also enhancing our Git integration with selective branching, allowing developers to branch out for a specific feature and pull only the items they need. You also get improved change comparisons to more easily review recent updates, and new folder relationships which show how feature workspaces connect to source workspaces.

We’re also launching two open-source projects to help teams move faster with Fabric: Agent Skills for Fabric and Fabric Jumpstart. Agent Skills for Fabric is an open-source set of purpose-built plugins that let you use natural language in the GitHub Copilot terminal to harness the full power of Microsoft Fabric. Additionally, Fabric Jumpstart is designed to help you get off the ground with detailed guidance, reference architectures, and single‑click deployments for sample datasets, notebooks, pipelines, and reports.

Finally, we are announcing that the Fabric Extensibility Toolkit (FET), an evolution of the Workload Development Kit (WDK), is now generally available. Along with this release, we are enabling support for full CI/CD, variable library, and a new management experience in the Admin portal.

Read the Fabric Platform announcement blog
Migrating your existing Azure service to Fabric
As Fabric continues to grow in functionality, we are also simplifying the migration from other Azure services. In addition to our existing Synapse tooling, we are bringing new migration assistants for Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure SQL in public preview.

The new Fabric migration assistant for Azure Data Factory and Synapse Analytics helps move your existing pipelines and artifacts like Spark pools and notebooks into Fabric with minimal disruption. It’s designed to support incremental modernization, allowing teams to evaluate, convert, and optimize pipelines as they transition to Fabric. The migration assistant for SQL databases helps move SQL Server into Fabric by importing schemas through DACPACs, identifying and resolving compatibility issues with AI assistance, and guiding teams through assessment and data copy workflows for a smoother cutover.

See more Fabric innovation
Explore the AI shift with The Shift podcast
In addition to the announcements above, we are also rolling out a broad set of Fabric innovations across the platform. For a deeper look at the updates and what’s new this month, visit the Fabric March 2026 Feature summary blog, the Power BI March 2026 feature summary blog, and the latest posts on the Fabric Updates channel.

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric
Sign up for the Fabric free trial. View the updated Fabric Roadmap. Try the Microsoft Fabric SKU Estimator.
Visit the 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
Sonata Software: Building an AI-ready data platform with data agents, ontology, and governance in Microsoft Fabric
Quadrant Technologies LLC: Real-Time Operational Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric: Deep Dive into RTI Capabilities, Anomaly Detection and Activator Alerting
Inspark: Why switch from Azure Synapse to Microsoft Fabric?
Esri: Unlock the power of location intelligence with ArcGIS for Microsoft Fabric
Dream IT Consulting Services: 8 Real-World Use Cases of Data Agents in Microsoft Fabric
UB Technology Innovations Inc.: From Data Platform to Decision Platform: How Microsoft Fabric and Copilot are Redefining Enterprise Analytics
Simpson Associates: Fabric Data Warehouse: Bringing Structure to Modern Data Strategies
Synapx Ltd.: Migrating Power BI to Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse with Medallion Architecture: A Strategic Imperative for Modern Construction Enterprises
Cloud Services: Real-Time Intelligence in Action: How Microsoft Fabric Helped Delfi Transform Its Newsroom
Cloud Services: Microsoft Fabric Data Agents: A New Reality
iLink Digital: Detect to Act in Seconds: How Real-Time Intelligence Is Rewriting the Rules of Emissions Management
Valorem Reply: How Nonprofits Are Rethinking Data with Microsoft Fabric

The post FabCon and SQLCon 2026: Unifying databases and Fabric on a single data platform appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Subscribe to The Shift podcast

Today we’re introducing “The Shift” podcast, an evolution of “Leading the Shift,” to share more dialogue. Grounded in questions we heard from you after announcements at Ignite, we’re releasing eight episodes this spring—one each week—that bring engineering, product, and strategy perspectives together. Across levels and backgrounds, this season’s agentic theme explores agents up and down the stack. Knowing change is the only constant, “The Shift” creates space for us all to think out loud.

Here’s a sneak peek of the new season

Topics we’ll explore weekly
Are my agents hunting for data?
How do agents work together?
Wait, my agent needs a database?
Is context engineering the new RAG?
What senses do my agents need to act?
Is Postgres the wave of the future?
Should my IT team hire agents?
How do we draw agentic borders?
Agents don’t succeed in isolation. They depend on how your data is unified, how your cloud handles scale, how your applications orchestrate across systems, and ultimately, how this serves people. At Microsoft, we see agents as catalysts for innovation across your entire environment, performing best when layers of the stack work together. That’s where the toughest challenges for technical teams emerge: observability, governance, security, optimization, and quality. It’s a team sport.
Your data strategy determines what your agents can reason over. Your cloud foundation determines what you can do reliably. Your agents and AI app experiences deliver business outcomes. Our colleagues and friends featured on The Shift are solving for these interdependencies. And what they all have in common is conviction that none of this works in pieces.

Our first episode, “Are my agents hunting for data?” drops tomorrow. We’ll sit with Ronald Chang, Dipti Borkar, Josh Caplan, and Cillian Mitchell from the Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft OneLake teams to cover why data preparation is essential to fueling agents with knowledge. And it’s perfect timing with Microsoft Fabric Community Conference next week in Atlanta. I hope you’ll join us to keep this conversation going.

Subscribe today on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, RSS.com, or wherever you listen and learn.

The post Unpacking your top questions on agentic AI: The Shift podcast appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Register once for unrestricted access to both events, allowing you to select the content that best meets your learning needs. If you’re a data professional looking to learn more about migrating and deploying powerful data platform solutions, or you’re a SQL pro who wants to stay ahead of innovations in SQL databases, SQL in Fabric, Azure SQL, and more, FabCon and SQLCon is your must-attend event in 2026.

FabCon and SQLCon will be one of the year’s largest gatherings of data professionals from around the world, bringing together tech enthusiasts, innovators, and industry leaders to explore the future of data, SQL, analytics, business intelligence, and AI integration.

Workshops, keynotes, sessions, and demos will take deep dives into the leading-edge developments within the worlds of Microsoft Fabric and databases, giving attendees a first look at product roadmaps and announcements, as well as an opportunity to connect first-hand with the teams building these solutions. There will also be informal networking opportunities throughout the week so you can share insights and make lasting connections with like-minded peers.

Keynotes and sessions with top experts and new features

Keynote speakers feature top Microsoft leaders and engineers from across the data and SQL universe including yours truly, Arun Ulag, Amir Netz, Wangui McKelvey, Nellie Gustafsson, Justyna Lucznik, Patrick LeBlanc and Adam Saxton (AKA Guy in a Cube), Shireesh Thota, Priya Sathy, Erin Stellato, Bob Ward, and Anna Hoffman to name just a few. These keynotes will give attendees a first look at the latest announcements, features, and updates in Fabric and databases, and show you how to implement them in your real-world scenarios.

I’m also thrilled to share that FabCon and SQLCon sessions have just been announced! Our diverse lineup of speakers and content covers the spectrum of use cases, challenges, fundamentals, and in-depth training for attendees of all levels—and, with the help of these expert sessions, you can start implementing new features immediately. Some of the topics I’m really excited about are:

• Monitor and Troubleshoot Your Data Solution in Microsoft Fabric with Li Liu and Haydn Richardson—explore best practices and new capabilities for consistent and reliable performance in your data solution.
• Empowering Fabric Administrators: Securing, Scaling, and Sustaining Your Data Estate with Arthi Ramasubramanian Iyer and Adi Regev—take a strategic look at how you can build confidence, clarity, and resilience across your Fabric estate to protect data at scale.
• From Reactive to Proactive: Solving SQL Performance Issues with Agentic AI: Learn how to implement agentic AI to detect regressions, analyze queries, find indexing gaps, and provide instant fixes.
• A Guide to Making the Most of Your SQL Skills Using Microsoft Fabric: Find out why, for many tasks, SQL is not only compatible, but often the most efficient way to build modern, scalable, and intelligent data solutions in Fabric.

Want the perfect gift? Get a FabCon and SQLCon discount!

I can’t wait to welcome you all to the first-ever combined FabCon and SQLCon event and see this conference expand to support professionals from across the world of data, analytics, and AI.

As we approach the holiday season, this is a great chance to treat yourself or a colleague to a gift they’ll love! FabCon and SQLCon features the content, training, and networking that will help attendees grow in their professional careers and make an immediate impact in their organization.

I also want to share an exclusive offer—register now before pricing increases later this month and receive an additional $200 off the price of admission with the discount code: FABHOLIDAY. This is your last chance to get locked in at these lower ticket prices!

Reminder: registration for either event gives you full access to both.

If you need help convincing your boss why this would make the perfect holiday gift, use our FabCon and SQLCon email templates to make the case.

The post FabCon and SQLCon: From workshops and keynotes to demos and deep dives appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

That mission is gaining traction at remarkable speed. Since Fabric launched two years ago, it has grown faster than any other data and analytics platform in the industry. More than 28,000 customers—including 80% of the Fortune 500—now rely on Fabric, and its ecosystem continues to expand as partners build solutions to solve the most complex data challenges.

Explore Azure announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2025

Another leap forward across Microsoft Databases and Microsoft Fabric

As Fabric becomes the central connection point for data, we’re strengthening the database layer at the heart of your data estate—ensuring you have the scale and performance required for AI.  

Microsoft already offers one of the industry’s most comprehensive database portfolios, and we’re expanding it even further—while deeply integrating these capabilities into Fabric. I’m excited to announce the general availability of SQL Server 2025, Azure DocumentDB, and SQL database and Cosmos DB in Fabric, along with the preview of our newest addition, Azure HorizonDB. With these new offerings, you have a world-class database option to build once and deploy at the edge, as platform as a service (PaaS), or even as software as a service (SaaS). And because our entire portfolio is either Fabric-connected or Fabric native, Fabric serves as a unified hub for your entire data estate. Below I’ll cover how these new databases are purpose-built to support your AI projects.  

Deploy the next generation of Microsoft Databases

Modernize your SQL estate with SQL Server 2025, now generally available

Microsoft has been shaping the SQL landscape for more than 35 years. Now, with the release of SQL Server 2025 into general availability, we’re introducing the next evolution—one that brings developer‑first AI capabilities at the edge, within the familiar T‑SQL experience. Smarter search combines advanced semantic intelligence with full‑text filtering to uncover richer insights from complex data. AI model management using model definitions in T-SQL allows seamless integration with popular AI services such as Microsoft Foundry.

Enterprise reliability and security remain best-in-class. Enhanced query performance, optimized locking, and improved failover help ensure higher concurrency and uptime for mission‑critical workloads. With strengthened credential management through Microsoft Entra ID via Azure Arc, SQL Server 2025 is secure by design. Your data is also instantly accessible for your AI and analytics in Microsoft OneLake with mirroring for SQL Server 2025 in Fabric, now also generally available.

SQL Server 2025 is the most significant release for SQL developers in a decade. And the response to our preview has been overwhelming, with 10,000 organizations participating, 100,000 databases already deployed, and download rate two times higher than SQL Server 2022. If you want to join all those who’ve already adopted SQL Server 2025, download it today.

Azure DocumentDB: MongoDB-compatible, AI-ready, and built for hybrid and multi-cloud

We’re excited to announce Azure DocumentDB, a new service built on the open-source, MongoDB-compatible DocumentDB standard governed by the Linux Foundation. The first Azure managed service to support multi-cloud and hybrid NoSQL, Azure DocumentDB can run consistently across Azure, on-premises, and other clouds.

Azure DocumentDB gives you the freedom to embrace open source while achieving scale, security, and simplicity. It’s AI-ready, with capabilities like vector and hybrid search to deliver more relevant results. Instant autoscale meets demand, and independent compute and storage scaling keeps workloads efficient. Security and availability is standard, with Microsoft Entra ID integration, customer-managed encryption keys, 35-day backups included, and a 99.995% availability service-level agreement (SLA). And soon, enhanced full-text search will add features like fuzzy matching, proximity queries, and expanded language support, making it even easier to build intelligent, search-driven apps.

Azure DocumentDB is now generally available, so you can try it today. You can also learn more about Azure DocumentDB and all the Azure Database news by reading Shireesh Thota’s, Corporate Vice President of Azure Databases, announcement blog.

Azure HorizonDB: PostgreSQL designed for your mission-critical workloads

PostgreSQL has become the backbone of modern data solutions thanks to its rich ecosystem, extensibility, and open source foundation. Microsoft is proud to be the #1 PostgreSQL committer among hyperscalers, and we’re building on that leadership with Azure HorizonDB.

Now in early preview, Azure HorizonDB is a fully managed, PostgreSQL-compatible database service, built to handle the scale and performance required by the modern enterprise. It goes far beyond open source Postgres, with auto-scaling storage up to 128 TB, scale-out compute up to 3,072 vCores, <1 millisecond multi-zone commit latency, and enterprise security and compliance. Vector search is built-in, along with integrated AI model management and seamless connectivity to Microsoft Foundry so you can build modern AI apps. Combined with GitHub Copilot, Fabric, and Visual Studio Code integrations, it provides an intelligent and secure foundation for building and modernizing applications at any scale. To learn more about Azure HorizonDB, read our announcement blog.

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Accelerate app development with Fabric SaaS Databases, now generally available

We are also releasing a new class of SaaS databases, both SQL database and Cosmos DB in Fabric, into general availability. Data developers now have access to world-class database engines within the same unified platform that powers analytics, AI, and business intelligence.

Fabric Databases are designed to streamline your application development. You can provision them in seconds, and they don’t require the usual granular configuration or deep database expertise. They provide enterprise-grade performance, are secure by default with features like cloud authentication, customer-managed keys, and database encryption, and come natively integrated into the Fabric platform, even using the same Fabric capacity units for billing.

With Fabric databases, developers now have the flexibility to build applications grounded in operational, transactional, and analytical data. Together, these offerings make Fabric a developer-first data platform that is streamlined, scalable, and ready for modern data applications.

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Learn more by reading Shireesh Thota’s, Corporate Vice President of Azure Databases, announcement blog.

All your databases connected into Fabric

We’re making it easier than ever to work with your entire Microsoft database portfolio in Fabric, giving you a single, unified place to manage and use all your data. Building on our existing mirroring support for Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL MI, we’re now announcing the general availability of mirroring for Azure Database for PostgreSQL, Azure Cosmos DB, and SQL Server versions 2016–2022 and 2025. With these databases mirrored directly into Fabric, you can eliminate traditional extract, transform, and load (ETL) pipelines and make your data instantly ready for analytics and AI.

Getting your data estate ready for AI with Microsoft Fabric

Choosing the right database is essential, but it’s just the beginning. The major opportunity lies in driving frontier transformation, where data becomes the foundation for an AI-native enterprise. We recommend focusing on three core steps:

• Unifying your data estate to eliminate silos and complexity.
• Creating semantic meaning so your data is ready for AI.
• Empowering agents to act on insights and transform operations.

In this section, I’ll dive into the latest enhancements to Microsoft Fabric that help you achieve every step of your data journey. This includes expanded interoperability in OneLake with SAP, Salesforce, Azure Databricks, and Snowflake, the introduction of Fabric IQ—a new workload that adds semantic understanding—and enhanced agentic capabilities across Fabric to help you build richer, AI-powered data experiences.

This is the future of data, and it’s already within reach. With Fabric and our database innovations, Microsoft is helping organizations move seamlessly from insight to action—unlocking the full potential of your data and the AI built on top of it.

Unify your data estate with Microsoft OneLake

Microsoft OneLake unifies all your data—across clouds, on-premises, and beyond Microsoft—into a single data lake with zero-ETL capabilities like shortcuts and mirroring. Alongside the additional mirroring sources for Microsoft Databases, we’re also introducing the preview of shortcuts to SharePoint and OneDrive. This allows you to bring unstructured productivity data into OneLake without copying files or building ETL pipelines, making it easier to train agents and enrich your structured data.

See how shortcuts and mirroring unify your data in OneLake:

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Once connected to OneLake, your data becomes easily discoverable in the apps your teams use every day like Power BI, Teams, Excel, Copilot Studio, and Microsoft Foundry. Today, we are taking that a step further with native integration with Foundry IQ—the next generation of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Agents rely on context—Foundry IQ’s knowledge bases deliver high-value context to agents by simplifying access to multiple data sources and making connections across information. You can use the OneLake knowledge source in Foundry IQ to connect agents to multi-cloud sources like AWS S3, on-premises sources, and structured and unstructured data.

Expanding OneLake interoperability with leading data platforms

We are also seeing great momentum with dozens of partners outside of Microsoft deeply integrating with OneLake, including ClickHouse, Dremio, Confluent, EON, and many more. And now, we are thrilled to add new, deeper interoperability with SAP, Salesforce, Azure Databricks, and Snowflake.

First, we’re deepening interoperability with the systems organizations rely on most, SAP and Salesforce. With the launch of SAP Business Data Cloud Connect for Microsoft Fabric, customers can allow bidirectional, zero-copy data sharing between SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) and Fabric. At the same time, we are working with Salesforce to integrate their data into Fabric using the same zero-copy approach, unlocking advanced analytics and AI capabilities without the overhead of traditional ETL.

We’re also strengthening interoperability with Azure Databricks and Snowflake so you can use a single copy of data across platforms. By the end of 2025, Azure Databricks will release, in preview, the ability to natively read data from OneLake through Unity Catalog, enabling seamless access without duplication or complex data movement. Looking ahead, Databricks will also add support for writing to and storing data directly in OneLake, allowing full two-way interoperability. Read more about this interoperability.

Our collaboration with Snowflake on bidirectional data access continues as well. We are introducing a new item in OneLake called a Snowflake Database and a new UI in Snowflake—both designed to allow OneLake to be the native storage solution for your Snowflake data. We’re also bringing Snowflake mirroring to general availability, allowing you to virtualize your external Snowflake-managed Iceberg tables in OneLake with shortcuts created and handled automatically. Together, these innovations let you run any Fabric workload—whether analytics, AI, or visualization—directly on your Snowflake-managed Iceberg tables.

Learn more about our Snowflake collaboration by reading our latest joint blog or by watching the following demo:

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Finally, in close collaboration with dbt Labs, we are also excited to announce built-in support for their industry leading data transformation capability. Now in preview, dbt jobs in Microsoft Fabric let you build, test, and orchestrate dbt workflows in your Fabric workspaces. Learn more in this blog.

Create semantic knowledge to fuel AI with Fabric IQ

As Frontier Firms train agents on their enterprise data, it’s become clear that quality and context matter more than data volume. Agents need business context across relationships, hierarchies, and meaning to turn raw data into actionable insight. That’s why we’re introducing Fabric IQ—a new workload designed to map your datasets to the real-world entities they represent, creating a shared semantic structure on top of your data.

The power of IQ lies in how it unifies disparate data types under a single, coherent framework. Built upon Power BI’s industry-leading, rich semantic model technology, IQ brings together analytical data, time-series telemetry, and geospatial information, all organized under a semantic framework of business entities and their relationships, properties, rules, and actions. You can then create operations agents, a new type of agent in Fabric, which can use this model to act as virtual team members, monitoring real-time data sources, identifying patterns, and taking proactive action. Instead of forcing your teams and even agents to think in terms of tables and schemas, IQ allows you to align data with how your organization operates.

Watch the Introducing IQ in Microsoft Fabric video

In short, Fabric IQ is designed to model reality with data, so that every insight, prediction, and action is grounded in how your organization actually operates. You can learn more about IQ in Yitzhak Kesselman’s, Corporate Vice President of Messaging and Real-Time Intelligence, announcement blog.

Empower data-rich agents with Copilot, Fabric data agents, and operations agents

As organizations scale their AI initiatives, the ability to connect intelligent agents with enterprise-grade data is becoming a critical differentiator. Fabric is making this possible with a set of integrated AI experiences: Copilot in Power BI helps you ask questions of your data, Fabric data agents allow deeper analysis, and the new Fabric operations agents let you monitor your data estate and take action in real time. These experiences can be used across Fabric or as foundational knowledge sources in industry-leading AI tools like Microsoft Foundry, Copilot Studio or even Microsoft 365 Copilot to power smarter, more data-rich AI experiences.

Beyond introducing operations agents as part of Fabric IQ, we’re also expanding what data agents and Copilot can do. Along with existing integration with Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio, Fabric data agents can now be embedded directly in Microsoft 365 Copilot. This lets business users (with the right permissions) access trusted knowledge from OneLake and transforms Microsoft 365 from a productivity suite into an intelligent insights platform.

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They can also act as hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, making it easy to integrate with other applications and agents across the AI ecosystem. Finally, data agents can now reason across both structured and unstructured data. Thanks to an integration with Azure AI Search, data teams can add their existing unstructured data search endpoints as a source in data agents. Learn more the Fabric data agent enhancements by reading the Fabric AI blog.

We’re also enhancing the standalone experience for Copilot in Power BI with a new search experience. Simply describe what you need, and Copilot will locate the relevant report, semantic model, or data agent and surface the right answers. This standalone experience is also coming to Power BI mobile so you can use it on the go.

Take a look at how you can apply all of these AI experiences together seamlessly:

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In short, we’re redefining what it means to have an AI-powered data estate. With data agents, Copilot in Power BI, and operations agents in Fabric IQ, AI is now woven across Fabric. And with native integration to Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio, you can easily add Fabric agents as building blocks to create more intelligent, informed custom agents.

You also can see more innovation coming to the Fabric platform by reading Kim Manis’, Corporate Vice President of the Fabric Platform, Fabric blog or by checking out the more technical Fabric November 2025 Feature summary blog.

Mark your calendar for FabCon and SQLCon

We are excited to announce SQLCon 2026, which will happen at the same time and the same location as the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference (FabCon), happening March 16–20, 2026 in Atlanta, Georgia. By uniting the powerhouse SQL and Fabric communities, we’re giving data professionals everywhere a unique opportunity to master the latest innovations, share practical knowledge, and accelerate what’s possible with data and AI, all in one powerful week. Register for either conference and enjoy full access to both, with the flexibility to mix and match sessions, keynotes, and community events to fit your interests.

Register for FabCon and SQLCon now

Watch these announcements in action at Microsoft Ignite

If you’re interested in seeing these announcements live, I encourage you to join my Ignite session, “Innovation Session: Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databases – the data estate for AI” either in person or online at no cost. I’ll not only cover these major announcements but show you how they come together to help you create a unified, intelligent data foundation for AI.

You can also dive deeper into these announcements and so much more by watching the rest of the breakout sessions across Azure Data:

Tuesday, November 18

• Modern data, modern apps: Innovation with Microsoft Databases
• Microsoft Fabric: The data platform for the next AI frontier
• Unifying your data journey: Migrating to Microsoft Fabric

Wednesday, November 19

• Premier League’s data-driven fan engagement at scale
• Create a semantic foundation for your AI agents in Microsoft Fabric
• Move fast, save more with MongoDB-compatible workloads on DocumentDB
• SQL database in Fabric: The unified database for AI apps and analytics
• The blueprint for intelligent AI agents backed by PostgreSQL
• Connect to and manage any data, anywhere in Microsoft OneLake
• Unlock the power of Real-Time Intelligence in the era of AI
• Empower Business Users with AI driven insights in Microsoft Fabric

Thursday, November 20

• Real-time analytics and AI apps with Cosmos DB in Fabric
• From interoperability to agents: Powering financial workflows with AI
• How Fabric Data Agents Are Powering the Next Wave of AI

Explore Azure announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2025

The post Microsoft Databases and Microsoft Fabric: Your unified and AI-powered data estate appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Secure your data with Microsoft Purview

AI innovation is transforming every industry, business process, and individual experience. As organizations adopt AI, one truth remains constant:

Your AI is only as good as your data

If poor quality, incomplete, biased, or sensitive data is fed into AI models, the results will be equally flawed, leading to sensitive data leaks and inaccurate predictions—both of which create potentially harmful outcomes and erode trust. High quality, governed, and secured data enables AI systems to deliver reliable insights and instill confidence in data usage and AI usage. Consider a team building an AI-powered customer service app. Without trustworthy data, the AI could give incorrect answers or expose sensitive information. In fact, about 99% of organizations have already experienced sensitive data exposure through AI tools, underscoring the urgent need for robust safeguards.¹ Compounding this challenge, many companies address data security and governance in silos, using separate point solutions for each, and different tools across cloud platforms, which makes it harder to ensure data discovery, quality, and protection consistently.

As organizations prepare for an AI future, they require a comprehensive approach that solves both security and governance together. Microsoft Purview offers a modern, unified approach to help organizations secure and govern data across their heterogenous data estate. Purview consolidates security, governance, and compliance into a single solution. Purview also bridges different tools across different data sources like Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Fabric, streamlining oversight and reducing complexity across the estate.

At FabCon Vienna, we are announcing new Microsoft Purview innovations for Fabric to help you seamlessly secure and confidently activate your data for AI. These updates span data security and data governance, allowing Fabric users to both

1. Discover risks and protect data in Fabric
2. Improve data discovery and quality across their Fabric estate

Discover risks and protect data

In today’s AI-powered world, data is both a powerful asset and a growing risk. Microsoft Purview helps organizations protect their data holistically by integrating Information Protection, Data Loss Prevention, Insider Risk Management, and Data Security Posture Management for AI. These tools work together to classify and secure sensitive data, prevent leaks, detect insider threats, and uncover AI-related risks. Paired with Microsoft Fabric, Purview builds upon existing data security such as OneLake Security while enabling innovation. Here are a few examples how Purview secures your Fabric estate:

Microsoft Purview Information Protection policies for Fabric items and Data Loss Prevention for structured data in OneLake

Now generally available, Microsoft Purview Information Protection policies allow Fabric users to manually label Fabric items, with access controls automatically enforced according to pre-defined protection policies set by administrators. Data Loss Prevention policies on structured data in OneLake is also now generally available, preventing data oversharing in Fabric through policy tip triggering when sensitive data is detected in assets. 

Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management indicators for Power BI

Microsoft Purview Insider Risk Management is now generally available for Microsoft Fabric and extends its detection capabilities to Fabric by introducing built-in risk indicators for user activities in Power BI, such as viewing, downloading, exporting, and managing sensitivity labels for Power BI artifacts. These indicators can be applied directly to data theft and data leak policies, giving organizations stronger signals to spot suspicious behavior. By correlating signals across different activities, Insider Risk Management helps uncover potential insider threats such as intellectual property theft, unauthorized data sharing, or policy violations in Fabric.

Microsoft Purview Data Risk Assessments for Fabric

Within Purview’s Data Security Posture Management for AI, Data Risk Assessments will now support discovering overshared Fabric data (dashboards, reports, and more) in preview. Fabric customers will benefit from Data Risk Assessments by easily identifying what data is most at risk of leakage within Fabric. A default assessment will be created to identify overshared Fabric data in the top 100 accessed Fabric workspaces.

Microsoft Purview Data Security and Compliance controls for Copilot in Power BI

Microsoft Purview Data Security and Compliance controls for Copilot in Power BI are now generally available for Fabric users. Users can discover data risks, such as sensitive information in Copilot in Power BI’s prompts and responses, with actionable recommendations surfaced in Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management for AI reports. Users can also govern Copilot interactions using audit, eDiscovery, retention policies, and identifying non-compliant usage to support responsible AI usage.

Now that we’ve covered how Purview helps secure Fabric data, the next focus is to ensure that Fabric users can use that data.

Improve data discovery and quality across their Fabric estate

Once an organization’s data is well-protected, the next challenge is making sure Fabric data consumers can find and trust the data for AI and analytics projects. This is where the Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog comes in, as a foundation for data discovery, quality, and curation across your Fabric environment. The Unified Catalog acts as a lever for data activation: it brings together powerful tools to improve data visibility and quality so that your analysts, data scientists, and AI models can easily locate the right data and use it with confidence. Estate-wide data discovery provides a holistic view of your data landscape, so data is not underutilized. Data quality tools empower teams to measure, monitor, and remediate issues in your data such as incomplete rows and columns and redundant data so business decisions are made with confidence based on the accuracy and reliability of the data. Paired with Microsoft Fabric, Purview builds upon existing data governance capabilities in Fabric such as the OneLake catalog while enabling innovation. Here are a few examples of how:

Sub item metadata in Fabric Lakehouse for comprehensive visibility of your Fabric estate

In preview, Fabric data consumers can now view metadata at the table, column, and file level in Purview, ensuring each artifact is recorded at its most granular detail for in-depth data discovery.

Defining custom attributes for business concepts using language your data consumers will understand

In the Unified Catalog, you can define and apply custom attributes to your data assets, which fosters better organization and utilization of your data. Now in preview, custom attributes provide data practitioners with the ability to apply specific attributes to business concepts such as glossary terms, critical data elements and data products. For a Fabric customer, this ensures that data is easier to understand and is more discoverable for usage of data workloads and AI use cases.

Published error records in Fabric for analysis and remediation of data quality issues

Now in preview, Fabric users can identify the root causes of data quality errors directly where they work in Fabric OneLake, providing Fabric data consumers with a one stop shop for remediation of data for its use in analytics and AI.

These governance enhancements empower teams to use data with confidence. A protected dataset isn’t very useful if users neither know it exists nor if they don’t trust its accuracy. Unified Catalog ensures that data assets are more discoverable and trustworthy for Fabric users

Looking forward

As organizations embrace the transformative power of AI, the need for robust data security and governance has never been greater. Microsoft Purview and Microsoft Fabric provide a unified foundation that empowers organizations to innovate confidently, knowing their data is protected, governed, and ready for responsible AI activation. We are committed to helping you stay ahead of evolving challenges and opportunities and invite you to explore these new capabilities. Join us on the journey toward a more secure, governed, and innovative data future.

Learn more about the latest innovations from the Fabric team

To learn more about Microsoft Security solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us on LinkedIn (Microsoft Security) and X (@MSFTSecurity) for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity. 

¹ Businesstechweekly.com, 99% of Organizations Expose Sensitive Data: The Security Risks of Uncontrolled AI Tools, May 28, 2025.

The post Microsoft Purview innovations for your Fabric data: Unify data security and governance for the AI era appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

The post Powering the next AI frontier with Microsoft Fabric and the Azure data portfolio  appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

With services like Azure AI Foundry, you can not only access generative AI, but build your own agents, tailor-made for your use cases. Creating these 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 and Microsoft OneLake, Fabric’s unified data lake. With OneLake, you can access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single data lake that spans the entire organization. OneLake can act as the central, accessible location for comprehensive data access and management.​ And once connected to OneLake, your teams can use the array of data and analytics tools in Fabric to integrate, transform, model, and prepare your data for any AI project—all in a pre-integrated and optimized SaaS environment.

Today we are going to focus on why Fabric and OneLake are the ideal data tools to fuel your AI projects in AI Foundry. First, we will talk through how you can unify your data estate on OneLake, then cover how Fabric’s workloads can help you prepare your data for AI projects. Finally, we’ll show you how easy it is to connect OneLake to Azure AI Foundry so you can start building data-driven agents in seconds.

Unifying your data estate on OneLake

For teams tasked with building new AI solutions, finding and accessing the necessary data across a sea of disconnected data services can be challenging at the best of times. To lay the foundation for long-term success, organizations need a more unified, flexible data estate based on a lake-centric approach. The right data lake foundation can help you unify all of your multi-cloud sources and allow your data professionals to work from the same data—reducing data duplication, improving collaboration, and streamlining analysis.

OneLake is designed as the single point to discover and explore data for everyone in your entire organization. You can unify all of your multi-cloud and on-premise sources using zero ETL shortcuts and mirroring in OneLake without data duplication or movement. Alternatively, you can leverage the 180+ connectors in Fabric Data Factory to move your data in from any other source. OneLake is automatically wired into every Fabric workload 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. You can also save time and reduce data duplication by loading data into OneLake only once and using a single copy across every Fabric engine and even other engines like from Snowflake.

Once enabled in OneLake, you can use domains and the OneLake catalog to organize your data into a logical data mesh and empower everyone to easily explore, manage, and govern their data. Take a look at the OneLake catalog:

Preparing and curating your data for AI projects

For generative AI solutions to be as accurate as possible, they need to be built with clean data and in a semi-structured way. You’ll need an analytics platform that can help you prepare your data before building custom AI experiences. ​With your data in OneLake, you can use Fabric’s various workloads to make the data AI-ready. Fabric has tools for data integration and engineering, data warehousing, data science, real-time analytics, data modeling and visualization, and even has native, industry-specific and partner-created workloads to help you accelerate your data projects.

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. 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. Copilot in Fabric 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. Fabric also comes with category-leading performance, instant scalability, shared resilience, and built-in security, governance, and compliance so you can feel confident using Fabric for your mission-critical workloads.

Connecting OneLake data to AI products

Now that your data is AI-ready, you need to connect it to your AI platforms like Azure AI Foundry to build and scale data-driven GenAI apps. We’ve built native integration between OneLake and Azure AI Foundry to make this as seamless as possible. Azure AI Foundry can operate directly on OneLake, opening endless possibilities for AI and app developers, data engineers, data scientists, and business users to interact using natural language to uncover insights from their data.

Azure AI Foundry

Azure AI Foundry is a platform designed to empower your developers, AI engineers, and IT professionals to customize, host, run, and manage AI solutions with greater ease and confidence. Similar to Fabric, Azure AI Foundry’s unified approach simplifies the development and management process, helping all stakeholders focus on driving innovation and achieving strategic goals. It’s designed to help your developers build more technical, customized AI solutions.

The integration between Azure AI Foundry and OneLake is built on the same shortcut technology that allows you to virtualize data in OneLake from your cloud sources like Amazon S3 and Google Cloud without having to move and duplicate the data. You can immediately work with your structured and unstructured data from OneLake in Azure AI Foundry without creating copies and adding more data sprawl. OneLake also directly integrates with Azure AI Search, which can store, index, and retrieve data, including vector embeddings, from your data sources including OneLake. 

Finally, you can ground your Azure AI Agent’s responses with data from Fabric using Fabric data agents to unlock powerful data analysis capabilities. Data agents (formally known as AI skills) in Fabric are AI-powered assistants that can learn, adapt, and deliver insights, allowing users to interact with the data through chat. With out-of-the-box authorization, this integration simplifies access to enterprise data in Fabric while maintaining robust security, ensuring proper access control and enterprise-grade protection. Check out this full demo:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/SBsErGew1yE?feature=oembedUsing data agents in Fabric as knowledge sources in Azure AI Foundry

Popular applications for data-driven agents

This seamless integration offers many opportunities for generative AI use cases across various industries, including:

• Enhancing data insights: Build agents that can help your business users explore and better understand critical data using natural language from structured, unstructured, and real-time data.
• Analyzing customer interactions: Build agents trained on your customer interaction data to enhance customer service, tailor support responses, and make data-driven decisions. These agents can detect language, summarize content, analyze sentiment, and convert insights into vector embeddings for future access in search queries.
• Customizing machine learning models: Tailor models to specific business needs, whether it’s predictive maintenance, fraud detection, or customer sentiment analysis. Azure AI Foundry, Azure Machine Learning, and Microsoft Fabric empower developers and data scientists to create custom models that fit their business requirements, grounded on their enterprise data in OneLake.
• Department-specific agents: Build agents that automate budget and expenses, increase up-sell and conversion opportunities, and improve operational efficiency
• Industry-specific agents: Build data-driven agents to streamline operations and manage OEE in manufacturing, optimize logistics and interact with customers in retail, and reduce patient-practitioner contact time in healthcare.

Ready to learn more?

Unlock a realm of new possibilities for your organization in the era of AI with the integration of Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI. Explore the potential, innovate, and thrive in the new digital landscape.

 If you want to learn more about these tools, consider:

• Signing up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
• Visiting the Microsoft Fabric website.
• Visiting the Azure AI Foundry website.

The post Build data-driven agents with curated data from OneLake appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

As you transition, we want to help ensure you keep access to all your data and can continue your existing work. That’s why we previously announced that you have 90 days to access your data in Power BI while you transition. Based on your feedback, we are also providing free Power BI Premium capacity for the first 30 days after the end of your previous subscription. The amount of free capacity will match the amount offered by your previously purchased P-SKU. This should reduce the need to pay for two capacities at the same time.  

How does the migration work?

As you transition to Fabric, you will need to migrate from your existing Power BI Premium capacity to a new Fabric capacity. To migrate, all you need to do is reassign your workspaces to the new Fabric capacity. We’ve even created an automated migration tool to help accelerate the process, which is especially useful if you have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of workspaces. This automated migration tool can help you programmatically migrate using Fabric REST APIs. Learn more about the manual and automated ways to migrate your workspaces here.  

What will happen at the end of my grace period?

After 30 days of free capacity, your operations will begin to be throttled and your jobs could be delayed or even rejected. Learn more about Fabric’s throttling policy. However, you will still have access to your Power BI workspaces and data if you need additional time to migrate to a F-SKU.  

After 90 days, you may lose access to your Power BI data. If you need more time, please contact your Microsoft account representative or Microsoft partner as soon as possible.  

Once you’ve migrated your data, you should delete your Power BI Premium capacities that are no longer in use. If these capacities are not deleted, operations will be slowed after 30 days, and the capacities will be frozen after 90 days and eventually deleted.  

Next steps toward transitioning to Microsoft Fabric

As you approach the end of your current agreement, create a plan to purchase Fabric and migrate your workspaces. You can view your Fabric capacity pricing options on the Fabric pricing page and get detailed instructions on how to purchase Fabric on the Buy a Fabric subscription documentation on Microsoft Learn. Please contact your Microsoft sales representative or partner to learn when you need to switch to a Fabric SKU and how we can support your smooth transition. 

Frequently asked questions

When do I have to transition to Microsoft Fabric?

Depending on your existing agreement, the retirement will impact you differently: 

• New customers can no longer purchase Power BI Premium per capacity. 
• Existing customers without an Enterprise Agreement (EA) will need to replace their Power BI Premium capacity subscription purchase with the purchase of Fabric capacity at the end of their agreement. 
• Customers with an existing EA agreement can continue to renew their Power BI Premium capacity purchase annually until the end of their EA agreement. However, at the end of their agreement, they will have to transition to Fabric capacity once the agreement has ended to continue using Microsoft Fabric. 
• Customers on a sovereign cloud will not be impacted by this retirement as they do not currently have access to Microsoft Fabric. We will provide additional information as soon as it’s available. 

What are the benefits of Fabric products?

Customers that migrate their purchase to Fabric capacity will enjoy a range of additional benefits. Fabric capacity is eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) which means Fabric customers can apply their Fabric spend against their MACC commitment. Additionally, Fabric capacity customers will get access to features only available in Microsoft Azure, like trusted workspace access and Managed Private Endpoints, which are critical components for supporting secure and private data access. These features are native to Azure and not available to Power BI Premium capacity customers. See all Microsoft Fabric products available in your Azure region on the Microsoft Fabric pricing page.    

Can I access Microsoft Power BI Embedded and Power BI Report Server from Fabric?

For Power BI Embedded, Fabric capacity is compatible with Power BI Embedded and can be used to run all of your embedded activities. Read the blog “Power BI Embedded with Microsoft Fabric” for more information. 

Power BI Report Server is now included with Fabric 64 SKU Reserved Instance purchases. You can get the Power BI Report Server key in the “Fabric Capacity” tab under “Capacity Settings” in the admin portal. It’s also available with Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise core licenses with software assurance. Learn more about ways to get the Power BI report server key here. 

Will I still need a Power BI Pro license to publish Power BI content?

Yes, this requirement will extend to Fabric capacity. Power BI report publishers and consumers still need a Power BI Pro license. However, for Fabric 64 SKU—a Power BI Premium P1 equivalent—or larger capacities, report viewers can view content with only a Fabric free license if the content is hosted in the capacity. Additionally, for non-Power BI activities, no Power BI Pro license is required.

The post Grace period for transitioning from Power BI Premium to Microsoft Fabric appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Microsoft Fabric has embraced this mission by integrating multiple products and services needed for an end-to-end analytics and AI solution, redefining existing processes to make them simpler and more intuitive. It has significantly simplified how one interfaces with such a comprehensive solution by creating a turnkey software-as-a-service experience that is easy to use with a much simpler and singular capacity usage model.

At Ignite 2024, Fabric took another bold step forward by adding operational databases to the Fabric portfolio with SQL database in Fabric. Adding operational data alongside Fabric’s analytical OLAP (Online Analytics Processing) data and real-time streaming data (RTI) opens a host of new scenarios for AI agentic applications. It also provides our customers with a unified data estate where consistent security and governance policies can be applied.

SQL database in Fabric leverages the proven mission-critical SQL Server database engine. It applies the core principles of Fabric to make deploying and managing an operational database simpler, more autonomous, secure by default, and optimized for AI. For example, deploying and configuring a database only requires a name, and the database is ready in seconds. It is secure by default with encryption at rest and in transit enabled. Networking security is also enabled via Private Link, and high availability and zone redundancy are automatically configured. 

SQL in Fabric includes native AI capabilities like support for vector and RAG (Retrieval-augmented Generation). You can also make calls directly to Azure AI services from the database and connect your database to Azure AI Foundry, VSCode, and GitHub for an integrated developer experience. In addition, you will find Microsoft Copilot integrated into every workload in Fabric including SQL in Fabric, simplifying administrative and management tasks for the databases. 

Beyond just the OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) database, Fabric introduces new agentic AI application scenarios by providing access to real-time streaming data from IoT sensors, alongside your system of record with SQL in Fabric and other data sets securely stored in OneLake. 

OneLake is at the heart of enabling a unified data estate. OneLake is built on top of Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 and can support any type of file, structured or unstructured. All Fabric data items like data warehouses and lakehouses store their data automatically in OneLake in Delta Parquet format. With the addition of SQL database in Fabric you now also have access to your mirrored SQL data in OneLake and mirroring data in Fabric is free. 

Fabric also provides a rich ecosystem to support agentic AI applications using your operational data. Changes from your data can be seamlessly sent to Azure OpenAI for business recommendations using Fabric Real-time Intelligence Eventstream, Spark, OneLake, and Power BI. 

This unification of data is incredibly powerful, enabling dynamic improvements to customer prompt responses and proactive, personalized offers. From a security standpoint, Fabric can enable consistent data protection from when the data is born to business insights via PowerBI. The same goes for data governance. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the number of new scenarios that Fabric can enable by creating a unified data estate. SQL database in Fabric is just the first Azure Database to be added to Fabric, with more Azure Databases to follow, so stay tuned.

Get started today

SQL database in Fabric is simple, autonomous, secure, and optimized for AI. We highly encourage you to try it today and see how you can build new AI apps faster and easier than ever! 

Learning with Fabric

We have multiple resources to help you and your teams swiftly ramp up on SQL database in Fabric: 

• Explore the documentation and build with our end-to-end tutorials.

• Skill up with the new Fabric Databases learn modules.

• Watch new Data Exposed episodes.

• Watch the new Microsoft Mechanics episode.

• Get the latest product news here on the Fabric updates blog.

• Check out an AI chatbot application example built on SQL database in Fabric. 

Fabric Community Conference Vegas: A must-attend event for database professionals! Be sure to take advantage of the discount code MSCUST for $150 off the registration price. 

FabCon Vegas is the perfect opportunity to connect with experts and data leaders to build your skills with Fabric Databases and Azure Databases and see how your peers are implementing their solutions. 

• Microsoft Fabric Community Conference March 31^st – April 2^nd, in Vegas! Workshops will also be available on March 29th, 30th, and April 3rd, making this the most comprehensive Microsoft Fabric learning experience to date.

• SQL pros can take advantage of a dedicated track for SQL in Fabric Databases and Azure Databases. 

• Connect with product specialists for 1:1 support in the Ask the Experts area. 

• You’ll get endless opportunities all week to engage with the Fabric and data communities through sessions, thoughtful discussions, attendee mixers, and interactive activations. 

• In touch with your Microsoft account team? Ask them if they have any special discounts to share.

Database experts at FabCon

• CVP of Azure Databases: Shireesh Thota, speaking at the event¹.

• Sessions from the Microsoft Databases Product team: Rie Merritt, Bob Ward, Mazuma Zahid, Erin Stellato, Davide Mauri, and more.

• Sessions from Database Community MVPs: Joey D’Antoni, John Morehouse, Monica Rathbun, Denny Cherry, Karen Lopez, Anthony Nocentino, Erwin de Kreuk, Warwick Rudd, Kelly Broekstra, Heidi Hasting, and Hamish Watson.

Microsoft Fabric

Unify your teams and data to accelerate AI innovation with a complete data platform

Try today

¹speakers subject to change

The post The art of simplifying the complex: Microsoft Fabric’s superpower appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

In this blog, we’ll lay out the latest and greatest of our curated Fabric skilling paths on Microsoft Learn to help your team drive transformative business outcomes. We’re also announcing a new certification exam available with a 50% discount! And of course, we’ll dive into our exciting upcoming in-person event, FabCon, where we’ll have even more surprises in store, plus a chance for you to connect with industry experts and the larger data-analysis community. Let’s get started!

Get certified as a Fabric Data Engineer

Learning Microsoft Fabric equips aspiring engineers with skills to streamline workflows, handle large-scale data processing, and integrate advanced AI tools. As a Fabric Data Engineer, you’ll have the chance to design and manage cutting-edge data solutions that move AI-powered insights. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of our new certification for Fabric Data Engineers. 

By earning your Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification, you’ll be equipped with an industry-recognized credential to set you apart in the growing field of data and AI. But you don’t have to do it alone. We’ve convened two live and on-demand series of expert-led walkthroughs to help you either get started with Fabric or build on your existing skills. Designed with Fabric Data Engineers in mind, these Microsoft Fabric Learn Together sessions (available in four time zones and three languages) are intended to give you the knowledge and confidence to ace your certification exam and take your data engineering career to the next level.

Want to explore the ins and outs of Fabric on your own time? We also have an official plan on Microsoft Learn featuring everything you’ll need to learn to pass the DP-700 Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification exam, including: 

• Describe the core features and capabilities of lakehouses in Microsoft Fabric.

• Use Apache Spark DataFrames to analyze and transform data.

• Use Real-Time Intelligence to ingest, query, and process streams of data.

• And much more! 

There’s more: For a limited time, you can get 50% off the cost of the DP-700 Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification exam. To be eligible, either attend one of the Learn Together sessions, complete the Plan on Microsoft Learn, or have previously passed the DP-203 exam. You have until March 31, 2025, to request the discount voucher, so get started fast-tracking your data engineering career today!

Join a community of Fabric users and experts at FabCon Las Vegas 

No matter your role or skill level, you can connect with other Fabric users and experts at the Fabric Community Conference from March 31-April 2, 2025, in Las Vegas. Join us at the MGM Grand for the ultimate Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, SQL, and AI event featuring over 200 sessions with speakers covering exciting new Fabric features and skilling opportunities. 

Connect one-on-one with community and product experts, including a dedicated partner pre-day, all-day Ask-the-Experts hours, a bustling expo hall, and plenty of after-hours social events. Workshops will also be available on March 29th, 30th, and April 3rd, making this the most comprehensive Microsoft Fabric learning experience to date. 

Don’t miss out! Register today to grab the early bird discount and use code MSCUST for $150 off registration. 

Build AI apps faster with SQL databases in Fabric 

Fabric’s capabilities and versatility are always expanding. We recently introduced a public preview of SQL databases to make building AI apps faster and easier than ever. SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric provides a unified, autonomous, and AI-optimized platform that accelerates app development by up to 71%, empowering businesses to innovate faster and gain a competitive edge in the AI era. 

To enhance your skills in working with SQL databases in Fabric, we’ve designed a new learning path called Implement operational databases in Microsoft Fabric. This course will guide you through the process of creating and managing SQL databases within the Fabric environment. You’ll also learn how to provision an SQL database, configure security settings, and perform essential database operations.

The course covers important topics such as data modeling, query optimization, and performance tuning specific to Fabric’s SQL capabilities. By completing this learning path, you’ll gain hands-on experience with Fabric’s SQL features and be better equipped to design and implement efficient database solutions.

You can also watch on-demand sessions of a recent SQL Database in Fabric Learn Together series to see how to build reliable, highly scalable applications where cloud authentication and encryption are secured by default. 

Unlock AI-ready insights and transform your data 

There’s always more to discover on Microsoft Learn, including a plan to help you harness AI and unify your intelligent data and analytics on the Fabric platform. With the Make your data AI-ready with Microsoft Fabric plan on Microsoft Learn, you’ll find out how to implement large-scale data engineering, build a lakehouse, and explore warehouse solutions.

This free, curated, and self-paced plan guides you through key learning milestones:

• Ingesting data through shortcuts, mirroring, pipelines, and dataflows. 

• Transforming data using dataflows, procedures, and notebooks. 

• Storing processed data in the lakehouse and data warehouse for easy retrieval. 

• Exposing data by creating reusable semantic models in Power BI, making transformed data accessible for analysis. 

Kick off your data and AI journey at Microsoft Learn 

If you’re looking to expand your Microsoft Fabric expertise and accelerate your professional development, we have everything you need:

• Get started on the path to becoming a Fabric Data Engineer Associate with our official plan on Microsoft Learn: Get Certified! Become a Fabric Data Engineer.

• Attend one of the Microsoft Fabric Learn Together sessions.

• Request a 50% discount voucher for the DP-700 Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification exam.

• Connect with Fabric experts at the Fabric Community Conference from March 31-April 2, 2025, in Las Vegas.

• Enhance your skills in working with SQL databases in Fabric with the Implement operational databases in Microsoft Fabric learning path.

• Harness AI to unify your data and analytics with the official plan on Microsoft Learn: Make your data AI-ready with Microsoft Fabric.

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