Pre-Days: Workshops and Partner Day 

The week began with pre-conference workshops on March 29th and 30th, offering deep dives into the latest advancements across Microsoft Fabric. Topics included analytics, data governance, databases, and AI. These interactive sessions equipped attendees with practical skills and insights they could immediately apply, including preparation for their Microsoft Fabric certification exams.

The Partner Day welcomed over 500 attendees representing GSIs (Global System Integrators), SIs (System Integrators), and Software Development Company partners. The goal was to strengthen connections between Microsoft and partner teams, deepen business relationships, and celebrate our partner community. Rajiv Phoughat, Principal—Advisory Digital at KPMG, joined me on stage to share KPMG’s data estate transformation journey. Rajiv highlighted how Fabric has helped KPMG Digital drive greater operational efficiency and deeper insights across their global organization. Partners also had the chance to engage directly with Fabric product leaders during an Ask Me Anything session, where they posed top-of-mind questions. Leaders from Microsoft’s partner teams were also on hand to share guidance and deepen relationships. 

Monday keynote

Arun Ulagaratchagan, Corporate Vice President of Azure Data, kicked off the keynote at the T-Mobile Arena in front of a packed house, and shared his vision for an AI-powered data platform that brings together ingestion, analytics, databases, business intelligence, and real-time intelligence—all on a unified, open, and governed data lake built on Azure. 

This vision set the stage for Amir Netz, Technical Fellow and CTO of Microsoft Fabric, and the Fabric team to unveil a series of exciting updates across the Fabric platform and workloads. Highlights included enhancements to OneLake Security, the introduction of Data Agents in Microsoft Fabric, expanded Copilot and AI capabilities across all Fabric SKUs, a streamlined migration experience for customers moving from Azure Synapse to Fabric, expanded integration between Fabric and Snowflake, and more. 

Following Arun and Amir, I had a blast partnering with Marco Casalaina, VP of Azure AI and Futurist, to demonstrate how AI is driving real business transformation. Together, we showcased a series of language-based demos translating speech in real-time to multiple foreign languages and interacting with AI agents using speech, highlighting how customers can use Azure AI Foundry and Fabric to build AI agents that deliver transformative customer experiences. Finally, we were joined on stage by executives leading data and AI organizations including Philip Withey, Chief Architect, London Stock Exchange Group, Maureen Tan, Head of AI CoE, Global Units, NTT DATA, Inc. and John Maio, VP, Enterprise Data & Analytics, CSX, who shared insights on their data estate modernization journey and how they are now leveraging Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft AI Foundry to unify their data estates and accelerate AI projects. 

A packed Fabric agenda: Sessions, community connections, ask the Experts, and more 

The rest of Monday and all of Tuesday were packed with learning opportunities, with sessions led by MVPs, Microsoft engineering teams, and customers alike. Highlights included MVPs Reza Rad and Minni Walia’s session on Real-Time Intelligence for Power BI users, Microsoft product leaders Bogdan Crivat and Charles Webb discussing the future of Fabric Data Warehouse, and a great talk by Phil Witney and Rich Acosta on how LSEG and Prudential Group Insurance Management implemented Fabric. 

Of course, sessions weren’t the only way to learn. The Community Lounge was buzzing with 1:1 conversations, live group chats, and impromptu meetups with community celebrities like Patrick LeBlanc and Adam Saxton of Guy In a Cube fame. 

Attendees also explored the expo hall, connected with sponsors, visited the Ask the Experts booths to meet the Microsoft teams building Fabric, and stopped by the Microsoft booth for a unique hands-on experience. There, Fabric came to life on the Forza Motorsport track, where drivers competed for top times, bragging rights, and fun prizes. With 545 players and 1,065 races, the experience generated over 1.4 billion rows of data, which were ingested for instant visualizations and insights by Fabric Real-Time Intelligence and Power BI. Kudos to all our racers and winners—we hope you’re rocking your new Fabric shoes! 

The rest of the conference was packed with learning and fun. Highlights included the inaugural Data Viz World Championship, the much-anticipated return of Power Hour After Dark, an unforgettable attendee party by the pool, and numerous events hosted by our amazing partners and sponsors.

Wednesday keynote

In Wednesday’s keynote, Dipti Borkar, VP of Microsoft OneLake and Fabric ISVs, shared how Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are using Fabric to accelerate AI innovation and enhance customer experiences. The keynote unveiled the new Workload Hub—a centralized platform to explore and leverage various workloads—and featured a panel of ISVs showcasing real-world integrations and their impact on customers. The panel included Sudhir Hasbe, Chief Product Officer at Neo4j, Shadi Shahin, VP of Product Strategy at SAS Institute, and Rob Elkins, Director of Product Management at ESRI. Each shared insights on how their organizations are building on Fabric to drive transformative outcomes. 

Maithili Dandige, GM of Microsoft Purview, then set attendees up for their final day of sessions by spotlighting our latest advancements in data security and governance. Key announcements included new features for Copilot in Power BI, new data loss prevention capabilities, and expanded insider risk management tools—underscoring Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to innovation in data protection, security, and compliance. 

About those sneakers… 

To help celebrate the first anniversary of the GA of Microsoft Fabric, we created a small number of customized Microsoft Fabric sneakers as a token of thanks for the launch team. However, we also wanted to use the opportunity to say thank you to some of the supporters from the broader Fabric community across MVPs and the customer community. Without their tireless support and advocacy, Fabric and FabCon 2025 would not have been the success that it is. We’re thrilled at the reception that it’s received online and during the event. We will be sure to incorporate more ways to surprise and delight the community in the future.

Looking ahead with Fabric

I hope all FabCon attendees left feeling inspired, equipped with fresh insights, new connections, and a renewed sense of excitement for the future of Microsoft Fabric. We’re excited to see how the ideas and innovations shared will shape the future of data and AI. 

Next up is Microsoft Build, taking place in Seattle from May 19 to 22, 2025. As one of our biggest events of the year, it’s a great opportunity to explore the latest Fabric innovations and stay ahead of what’s next. Register today and be part of the momentum. 

If you missed the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, don’t worry—there’s another chance to be part of the experience. Join us this September 15 to 18 in Vienna, Austria, for the European Fabric Community Conference. Reconnect with the community from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and enjoy a full week of sessions, insights, and networking. I’m looking forward to seeing you there!

Microsoft Fabric

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Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

• If you do nothing else, download and reference the Fabric one-pager. 

• Sign up for the Fabric free trial. 

• View the updated Fabric Roadmap. 

• Visit the Fabric website. 

• Join the Fabric community. 

• Register for the Fabric Ask the Experts series and join us for our monthly Q and As. 

• 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. 

The post Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2025 Highlights: Community growth and innovation appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

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.

From March 31 to April 2 at the MGM Grand, this year’s conference is set to be the biggest Fabric learning experience yet. You’ll have your choice of more than 200 sessions—a 40% increase from last year—for deeper insights into the latest innovations in data, governance, analytics, and AI. Beyond the sessions, hands-on workshops will be available on March 29, 30, and April 3, providing immersive, practical learning experiences. Expect keynotes from Microsoft and industry leaders, a partner expo featuring the latest innovations, and dedicated networking spaces like Ask the Experts and the Community Lounge for networking.

With so much great content, choosing the right sessions can feel overwhelming. To help you make the most of your time, we’ve curated a list of must-attend sessions. After the keynote, we recommend kicking off your learning with the Corenotes sessions, led by the experts who build these products. These sessions provide key insights into the latest developments, roadmaps, and the sessions you won’t want to miss throughout FabCon. From there, you can explore our recommended sessions below to gain the strategies and insights you need to unlock the full potential of Microsoft Fabric in your organization.

Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2025

Over 200 sessions of deeper insights into the latest innovations in data, governance, analytics, and AI.

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Fabric corenote sessions

• The Future Unfolded: Microsoft Fabric for AI and Data Science
• Fabric Data Engineering Roadmap 
• Unify your data estate with OneLake, the OneDrive for data 
• The Roadmap for SQL database in Fabric 
• Fabric Data Factory: What’s New and Roadmap 
• Power BI Roadmap: Strategy, Vision, and Demos 
• The future of Fabric Data Warehouse: what’s new, what’s coming 
• Revolutionize your business with timely insights and actions using Real-time Intelligence 

Fabric fundamentals 

You Could Have Invented Fabric: a Beginner’s Guide with Eugene Meidinger—Microsoft Fabric can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re new to big data concepts. In this session, Eugene will break down how Fabric brings multiple technologies under one umbrella and explore how, with enough effort, you can build the Delta Lake foundation yourself. You’ll come away understanding how Fabric resolves common pain points and why making the switch could be a game changer. 

Power BI 

Experience the Power of SQL and Power BI with Microsoft Fabric with Bob Ward and Patrick LeBlanc—Microsoft Fabric is redefining data analytics, but Microsoft SQL remains a powerful player in the mix. This session explores how to integrate and replicate SQL data into Fabric in near real-time, leveraging both platforms to drive business success. Plus, with SQL vs. Guy in a Cube, you never know what surprise guests might show up! 

The latest in AI

Unlocking Data-Driven Insights with AI Skills in Microsoft Fabric and Beyond with Amir Jafari and Misha Desai—Join this session to learn how to create and customize AI-powered Data Experts in Microsoft Fabric’s AI-powered data platform, leveraging generative AI for deeper insights. Discover how to tailor AI skills to your data, integrate them across the Microsoft ecosystem, and transform your data into a strategic asset. 

Changing the way we interact with data in the era of AI with Marc Lelijveld—Join Marc for a demo-rich session exploring how Microsoft Fabric enables dynamic conversations with your data, moving beyond static reports. See Fabric AI Skills, Microsoft Copilot, and Power Virtual Agents in action as Marc shows you how to unlock insights from warehouses, semantic models, and more. 

Databases

Welcome to the Party: Microsoft Fabric for DBAs with Rob Carrol—Microsoft Fabric is bringing DBAs to the main stage! With Fabric Databases, you can now unify transactional and analytical workloads on a single, powerful platform. Join this session to explore seamless SQL Server integration, replicating delta tables in OneLake, and how to leverage your DBA skills to manage and optimize Fabric Databases like a pro. 

A Deep Dive into SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric with Yo-Lei Chen and David Levy—Discover how SQL database is transforming Fabric into a unified data platform, seamlessly connecting transactional workloads with data lakes and business intelligence tools. In this session, Yo-Lei and David will dive into SQL database’s enterprise-scale capabilities, autonomous management, and best practices for integration—helping you build a powerful, efficient data stack within Fabric. 

Data Factory and Data Warehouse

Transforming Data Warehouse Migrations with an AI Powered Assistant with Ancy Philip and Omeed Chandra—Join us to explore the migration assistant for Fabric Data warehouse, an AI powered tool designed to revolutionize data warehouse migrations. This session will provide an in-depth exploration of the current capabilities, upcoming features, and the innovative processes that drive our solution. Learn about the challenges we faced, the breakthroughs we achieved, and the future vision we are working towards. Whether you are a SQL Developer or Data Engineer, this presentation will offer valuable insights into the next generation of data migration technology. 

Getting Started with Open Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric with Maraki Ketema and Anudeep Sharma—Join the team for a deep dive into Open Mirroring, a key tool for data replication. Learn about its landing zone for logs, data loading, incremental updates, schema management, and future enhancements. Ideal for data engineers and IT professionals, this session provides a comprehensive guide to efficient data handling with Open Mirror. 

Security and governance 

Securing Your Fabric Workloads—Best Practices from the Fabric Security Team with Elena Scilletta and Paddy Osborne—Learn best practices for securing your Fabric workloads, from leveraging built-in security features to meeting your business needs. This session will cover strategies for access control, data protection, and secure integration with Microsoft and third-party resources, ensuring a robust security posture for your Fabric environment. 

Manage, Govern, and Secure Your Fabric Data with OneLake Catalog and Microsoft Purview with Anton Fritz and Yaron Canari—Managing data security and governance across a fragmented data estate is challenging and costly. Join this session to learn how Fabric’s mission-critical foundation supports streamlined governance with the OneLake catalog and enhances security through built-in Fabric features alongside the advanced capabilities of Microsoft Purview. 

Microsoft OneLake

Unify Your Data Estate with OneLake, the OneDrive for Data with Adi Regev and Josh Caplan—See how OneLake is revolutionizing data management by eliminating silos and unifying storage across organizations and clouds. With the OneLake Catalog, easily explore, reuse, and manage data, while business domains empower teams to work independently in a scalable data mesh—without the complexity of separate lakes. 

Harnessing the Power of OneLake and AI Foundry with Miquella de Boer—Explore the power of Microsoft Fabric’s open and AI-ready data lake in this deep-dive session on seamless data integration and AI-driven innovation. Learn how OneLake supports diverse data formats like Delta and Iceberg, while AI Foundry enhances data science and engineering workloads—unlocking new efficiencies and real-world use cases.

Additional can’t-miss sessions 

Building Fabric-native Experiences and Workloads to Power AI Transformation with Asif Kazi—Discover how industry-leading ISVs and partners are integrating into Microsoft Fabric to build powerful analytics and app solutions. This session explores Fabric’s Workload Development Kit, monetization opportunities via Azure Marketplace, and real-world examples of partner workloads, showcasing how to leverage the Fabric ecosystem for maximum impact. 

Revolutionize Your Business with Timely Insights and Actions Using Real-Time Intelligence with Tessa Kloster and Yitzhak Kesselman—Real-Time Intelligence empowers businesses with instant data insights and analytics. This session explores its evolution, key features, and impact on decision-making, along with customer success stories that showcase how it can transform your data strategy and drive growth. 

Trailblazers: Women Leading the Future of Data and AI with Priya Sathy, Ope Aladekomo, Erin Stellato and Swetha Mannepalli—Join a panel of inspiring women leaders driving change in data and AI. They’ll share their journeys, challenges, and insights on innovation, leadership, and the power of diversity in shaping the industry’s future. 

Register today

As with last year, Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2025 is an in-person-only event, making it the ultimate opportunity to connect with experts and peers face-to-face. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn about Fabric and see firsthand how Microsoft can help your organization prepare for the era of AI. Register today. 

Sign up now to secure your spot and save $150 on your registration with the code MSCUST. Offer valid until the conference begins on March 31. 

The post Don’t miss these Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2025 sessions 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.

Fabric Community Conference

Bigger and better than ever

Sign up today

The post Power your AI transformation with Microsoft Fabric skilling plans and a certification discount appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Sign up now to secure your spot and save $150 on your registration with the code MSCUST. Offer valid until the conference begins on March 31^st. 

Get up to date on the latest with Microsoft Fabric 

Join us and don’t miss out! The Microsoft Fabric product team, along with customers, partners, and Microsoft MVPs, will be there to share insights on the latest advancements we are making in the era of AI. Dive deep into Microsoft’s data, AI, and governance product portfolio through workshops and sessions led by a stellar lineup of community experts and Microsoft speakers. This will be a great opportunity to connect—and reconnect—with members of the Fabric community and other Microsoft data users worldwide, fostering both personal and professional relationships while learning from your peers’ success stories. 

Here are some of the key topics that will be covered: 

• What’s new and coming to Microsoft Fabric—get ready to power your AI transformation with a powerful, all-in-one unified data platform. 

• Deep dive into our newest releases, including Fabric Databases, Real Time Intelligence, the OneLake Catalog, and more. 

• See how AI-powered experiences in Fabric like Copilot and AI skills can help everyone get more done, faster. 

• Upskill your data teams with hands-on, specific training for roles across your data estate. You can get started today with the “Make Your Data AI Ready with Microsoft Fabric” skilling plan on Microsoft Learn and help your teams master data engineering, Lakehouse, and warehouse solutions.  

• See how you can secure and govern your sensitive data with built-in capabilities in Fabric and seamless integration with Microsoft Purview. 

• Learn how to create innovative, generative AI-powered solutions with Azure AI Foundry and Azure Machine Learning to empower your organization with responsible AI practices. 

• Hear directly from our customers and partners about how they have successfully used Fabric in their AI transformation projects. 

Visit the community lounge and connect with data professionals, including community leaders, super users, student ambassadors, Microsoft MVPs, and more. Whether you want to network, discuss specific topics, or simply relax and chat, the lounge offers a welcoming space for everyone. Enjoy fun activities like trivia, bingo, and scavenger hunts, and don’t miss our newest Real-Time Intelligence racing demos, where you can race to win prizes! 

The Ask the Experts area is also back, where data, analytics, and AI specialists will answer your toughest technical questions. Whether you’re solving a specific problem, exploring new techniques, or just chatting with experts, you’ll find the help you need. Experts include community members, Microsoft engineering and product teams, and the Fabric Customer Advisory Team (CAT), available throughout the event. 

Plus, don’t miss the Interactive Learning Labs, where daily hands-on sessions with experienced data professionals will help you tackle real-world scenarios, learn new skills, and explore the latest features in a collaborative environment. 

Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

Bigger and better than ever.

Join us.

Back by popular demand, you will have the chance to join diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) panels and sessions, offering a safe and welcoming space to discuss today’s most pressing issues. Hear from diverse speakers as they share their stories, perspectives, and best practices for building a more inclusive and equitable data community.  

We are excited to welcome you back to the Fabric Community Conference (#FabCon) and we look forward to seeing you in Las Vegas! 

The post Don’t miss out: Join the 2025 Microsoft Fabric Community Conference  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.

But as you prepare for a future built on AI, you also need clean data to fuel AI. Fostering game-changing AI innovation requires a well-orchestrated data estate that can support everything from small AI pet-projects to scalable AI solutions that span the company. This is a challenging prospect for most organizations whose data environments have grown organically over time with specialized and fragmented solutions. A complex data estate leads to data sprawl and duplication, infrastructure inefficiencies, limited interoperability, and even data exposure risks—not an ideal place to start your AI innovation.

For data leaders trying to streamline and advance their data estate, the burden is often on you to search through the thousands of data and AI offerings, find the right set of offerings, figure out how to integrate them, and do it in such a way that is scalable and can evolve over time. Most data leaders would rather focus on the outcomes of their tools rather than spend all their time integrating specialized solutions and maintaining their data estate.

If you are thinking about how you can prepare your data estate for the era of AI, or will soon, I invite you to join us for the Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum on October 30^th, 2024. The event is online only and free to attend.

A digital event designed for data leaders 

Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum

Learn how you can prepare your data and analytics for game-changing AI innovations.

Register here

The Data and Analytics Forum is an upcoming, digital event designed to help data leaders navigate the current data and AI landscape. Microsoft experts will walk you through the latest trends and industry best practices to help you stay ahead of the curve. You will also hear learnings from current data leaders who have successfully implemented an AI-ready data strategy. Finally, we will highlight how the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, a suite of analytics, database, AI, and governance technologies, can help you create a powerful, agile, and secure data and AI foundation, made simple.

The first half of the event will include a keynote session on the current data and AI landscape, followed by your choice of three breakout sessions. Here are the full list of sessions: 

• Data and Analytics Forum keynote: Jessica Hawk, Corporate Vice President of Data, AI, and Digital Applications, will cover the current data landscape now with AI, how the Microsoft Intelligence Platform can help organizations transform their data estate, and, through a fireside chat with customers, how companies have been able to prepare their data estate to take advantage of AI. 

• A data foundation that unlocks AI innovation: Emerson Gatchalian, Chief Data and Analytics Officer Americas, will zoom out to study the concepts and conditions at the root of today’s data and analytics stack, from what’s driving investment to the issues companies face in siloed data. Then he’ll show how the right data foundation can meet this AI moment. 

• Fuel your data culture with generative AI: In my session, we’ll explore both the challenges and opportunities that data leaders face in building a data-driven culture and how modern tools and next generation AI can help accelerate your path. 

• Data governance in the era of AI: Karthik Ravindran, General Manager of Enterprise Data and AI Governance will cover governance and its importance in an AI world, the influence of data on AI, and the opportunities and the quality challenges of generative AI. Governance practices will be covered, leading to an overview of Microsoft Purview.

Register today

Register now for the Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum and learn how to prepare your organization to take advantage of the latest data and AI innovations.

See the latest innovation coming to Fabric

Check out the latest capabilities coming to the Microsoft Fabric platform by reading the European Fabric Community Conference 2024 announcement blog.

We will also be releasing even more innovation at Microsoft Ignite this year. You’ll see demos of the latest capabilities for Fabric and across all Microsoft products. You can also 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. 

• 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. 

• Explore the Fabric technical documentation. 

¹Expanding AI’s impact with organizational learning.

The post Navigate the data and AI landscape by joining us at the Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

The European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024 has officially come to a close and we hope it left attendees, organizers, and volunteers feeling inspired and excited to apply their learnings. This year’s conference was held in the beautiful city of Stockholm and brought together our amazing community of Microsoft Fabric users, practitioners, and industry leaders from across Europe and beyond for four days of immersive learning and networking. The conference was a celebration of innovation, collaboration, and the power of community. With more than 3,000 attendees from 61 countries, the conference was a celebration of innovation, collaboration, and the power of community.

Let’s take a look at some of the top moments from the event. 

Wednesday Keynote 

The conference kicked off with a warm attendee welcome and an action-packed keynote delivered by Arun Ulag, Amir Netz, and experts from across the Fabric team. Arun and Amir set the stage for an exciting event and shared the latest capabilities coming to the Fabric platform. These announcements included OneLake shortcuts for Iceberg tables (preview), Azure Databricks Unity Catalog mirroring into OneLake (preview), new Copilot in Fabric experiences across workloads (preview and general availability), deeper integration with Microsoft Purview, and so much more. Read Arun’s Fabric Community Conference blog for more information on the announcements.  

Thursday Keynote

Each day of the conference began with a new Microsoft-led keynote, and in the Day 2 session, I led off with our inspiring vision for how Microsoft is making it easier to apply AI at scale with an end-to-end stack across data, analytics, and AI. I then introduced Marco Casalaina, who shared a vision for the future of AI and Fabric’s role in revolutionizing how users interface with their data to drive actionable insights and hold two-way conversations with their data. 

Friday Keynote

I was honored to deliver the first part of the Day 3 keynote, where I was joined onstage by Fabric customers to uncover their real-world challenges and opportunities in establishing a data culture that will allow them to take full advantage of AI innovations at scale. In part two, Rudra Mitra took the stage to discuss security and governance and demonstrated how Microsoft Purview and Fabric are enabling users to secure their data across a single, unified data estate.  

Community-led content 

The conference offered a diverse range of sessions and workshops for beginners through to seasoned professionals. Speakers guided attendees through topics spanning data integration, machine learning and AI, security and governance, and advanced analytics. During the pre-conference hands-on workshops, participants had the opportunity to gain practical experience with the latest tools and techniques. 

Connections and networking 

At the heart of the event was of course the Fabric community. Over the course of the conference, there were endless opportunities for attendees to connect with like-minded professionals to share experiences, challenges, and collaborate on new ideas.  

The highlight for many was getting to meet other Fabric users in the community lounge, exhibit hall, networking events, or even casually in the convention center hallways going to and from sessions. There was a feeling of community that underscored the event, making it a truly memorable experience for those in attendance. 

Continue your learning experience 

Just because European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024 has ended, it doesn’t mean your learning has to stop there. 

Data and AI Forum (digital event) 

Join us at an upcoming event designed to help data leaders navigate the current data and AI landscape—the Data and AI Forum. You will hear from Microsoft experts, partners, and customers on the latest trends and industry best practices to help you stay ahead of the curve.  

This digital event will include a keynote session hosted by Jessica Hawk that outlines the current data landscape now with AI and a fireside chat with customers to see how they have been able to prepare their data estate to take advantage of AI. After the keynote there will be three breakout sessions on establishing an AI-ready data foundation, governing data and AI, and a session hosted by me on how you can fuel your data culture with generative AI.

Microsoft Ignite 2024 (in-person and online) 

One of the biggest events on the Microsoft calendar is right around the corner and you can join us either in person in Chicago, Illinois or online. Stay one step ahead of the newest Microsoft innovations and join fellow professionals who are ready to upskill and collaborate.

Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2025 (in-person) 

Missed the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024? Join us in Las Vegas, Nevada in 2025 for the next Microsoft Fabric Community Conference event and reconnect with the Fabric community for a week of sessions and networking.

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric  

Microsoft Fabric

Reshape how everyone accesses, manages, and acts on data with a single, AI-powered platform

Explore solutions

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric:  

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

The post Highlights from the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024 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

Learn how to set up Fabric for your business and discover resources that help you take the first steps

Try Fabric today

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.

As Microsoft Fabric revolutionizes data analytics by integrating multiple services into a unified platform, we’ve made it a core part of our mission to help users master their Fabric skills to maximize the value of their data. Our roster of on-demand skilling courses, expert-led training sessions, and comprehensive exams covers every aspect of Fabric, setting you up for success no matter your goal. In this blog, we’ll review your options to build Fabric expertise, including an upcoming opportunity to connect with Fabric experts for in-person workshops and Q&A sessions.

Fabric bridges the gap between your data and your goals

Microsoft Fabric is our comprehensive cloud analytics platform designed to unify multiple services, including Power BI, Data Factory, and Synapse Analytics. With Fabric, data professionals can now collaborate on a unified platform, using shared tools and data formats for the first time. Its value lies in its ability to bridge the gap between raw data and actionable insights, enhancing the capabilities of data professionals and transforming business analytics.

Fabric Analytics Engineers play a vital role by preparing, transforming, and delivering this high-quality data from various Fabric components—such as lakehouses and data warehouses—for data scientists and analysts to draw actionable insights, thus bridging the gap between raw data and informed decision-making. Our Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer training course on Microsoft Learn capitalizes on this by teaching the implementation and management of Fabric components for creating and deploying analytics assets.

Connect with the Fabric community at our European #FabCon

No matter your role, our first-ever European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference promises a deep dive into the world of Microsoft Fabric, exploring its applications in data warehousing, data movement, AI, real-time analytics, and business intelligence. Running September 24-27, 2024, in Stockholm, Sweden, this event follows the success of our inaugural conference in Las Vegas.

Attendees can expect explorations and demos of the latest innovations, and they can drop into our Community Lounge for face time with industry experts. In addition to many of the sessions from the Vegas conference that our European customers may have missed, we’ll also have speakers reviewing exciting new Fabric features and skilling opportunities, plus updated flash cards to help you learn Fabric and Azure OpenAI concepts in a fun and playful way.

Register for the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference today (use code MSCUST for €200 off!) and prepare to get empowered with the skills and insights needed to leverage Fabric’s capabilities effectively, in addition to fostering a community of data enthusiasts and professionals eager to harness the power of data and AI for transformative business outcomes.

Join the Microsoft Fabric and AI Learning Hackathon

Looking to stretch your Fabric skills (pun intended) even further? Starting September 16, the Microsoft Fabric and AI Learning Hackathon arrives to unleash your creative potential and propel your skills to the next level.

This online event is your playground for exploring the power of Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI, all while collaborating with fellow tech enthusiasts and competing for exciting prizes. The hackathon is free to join, but like a password to a secret club, you must complete an online Microsoft Learn Challenge first! This Challenge lets you engage with some cutting-edge technology and chat with experts before you start hacking.

Fuel your imagination with endless possibilities:

• Choose your path: Whether you’re a solo adventurer or a team player, you can dive into any of the diverse offerings. Design AI solutions for real-world problems, build chatbots with personality, or explore the cutting edge of natural language processing—the possibilities are endless.
• Level up your expertise: Dive into a treasure trove of learning resources, including workshops, live sessions with Microsoft experts, and exclusive access to Azure OpenAI. This is your chance to gain valuable insights, sharpen your skills, and become a Fabric and AI maestro.
• Connect and collaborate: The Hackathon isn’t just about individual brilliance; it’s about sharing ideas, brainstorming solutions, and building impactful connections. Join the dedicated Hackathon forum, meet like-minded peers, and foster lasting collaborations.
• Compete for prizes: At the end of the Hackathon, submit a description of your project, the solution overview, a short video demo, and link to a GitHub repository for your chance to win prizes!

Microsoft Fabric and AI Learning Hackathon

Building the next wave of innovative AI powered data analytics applications with Microsoft Fabric

Register today

RSVP to our upcoming livestream series to learn more about the Hackathon. This is your chance to get started, plus meet other hackers, mentors, and experts who will help you along the way. Come with ideas or come for inspiration, we’d love to hear what you’re planning to build.

Have more questions and ideas after attending the livestream? We’ve got you covered! Join us for an Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) event the following day on September 17th, 9am PT where we will be answering live questions and sharing even more details and resources to help you get started.

In addition, you can join us in the Microsoft Fabric Community Forums and DevPost Dischord for 24-hour Q&A support!

Streamline your Fabric skilling with our curated learning plan

With such a wide array of online skilling resources, we want to make sure you find the right one to suit your needs. That’s why earlier this year we introduced Plans on Microsoft Learn, a new way to offer structured, guided learning for Azure tools and solutions. These Plans provide curated content, clear milestones, and automated reminders to enhance learning efficiency, streamlining the path for you to acquire in-demand technical skills.

With the Make your data AI ready with Microsoft Fabric Plan, you’ll learn how to use AI to unify your intelligent data and analytics on the Fabric platform, with learning milestones that include:  

• Ingest data: Learn various methods for bringing data into Fabric, including shortcuts, pipelines, and dataflows. 
• Transform data: Transform data using dataflows, procedures, and notebooks. 
• Store data: Learn how to store processed data in both the Lakehouse and Data Warehouse for efficient retrieval. 
• Expose data: Discover how to create reusable semantic models in Power BI to make the transformed data accessible for analysis. 

Learn from our Fabric pros, then test your skills

Whether you’re pursuing a career as a Fabric Analytics Engineer or want to brush up on your overall Fabric know-how, there’s plenty more to help you reach your goal.

Our Implementing a Data Lakehouse with Microsoft Fabric Virtual Training Day—basically an online skilling bootcamp—explores the distinction between data lakehouses and traditional data setups, and takes a spin through key components like Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory.

Fabric Career Hub, meanwhile, has everything you need to get you ready to take our Fabric Analytics Engineer certification exam, including:

• Live sessions, hosted by Fabric experts, with detailed walkthroughs of Fabric learning resources. These sessions are typically broadcasted live with instructor Q&A, and then available on-demand.
• Hour-long cram sessions during which certified trainers will guide you through focus areas, pepper you with sample questions, and impart any helpful tips and tricks to get your ready for the big test. 
• A practice test featuring 50 sample questions to help you identify specific areas to focus on, ensuring you’re well-equipped to ace your certification.

There’s also on-demand Fabric content to watch with our Learn Live series, which features Fabric experts and engineers to discuss and answer questions from participants, and self-guided learning paths that cover everything from AI, to data ingestion, lakehouses, and real-time analytics. Building data pipelines to regulatory compliance.

There’s never been a better time to master Fabric

When it comes to Fabric, we have a treasure chest of knowledge with interactive activities, exciting challenges, and expert-led deep dives to help you stretch your knowledge. Explore our Get Started with Microsoft Fabric learning path for an in-depth look at Fabric’s vast capabilities, then register for the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference to get hands-on experience and make new connections.

The post Learn career advancing skilling resources at the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.