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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are my agents hunting for data?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check out a quick demo of operations agents in Fabric:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe to The Shift podcast

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

Here’s a sneak peek of the new season

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

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

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

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

Microsoft anticipated this shift early on. We invested heavily in real-time services in Azure, including Event Hubs, Stream Analytics, and Data Explorer, powering mission-critical real-time workloads for years for both Microsoft and our customers and delivering proven reliability, performance, and planet scale.

But the decisive step was building Real-Time Intelligence into Microsoft Fabric on top of that mature foundation in Azure. Real-Time Intelligence unifies streaming, analytics, and action in one governed platform, bringing batch and streaming together in OneLake and Fabric.

Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Streaming Data Platforms, Q4 2025, which we view as a strong validation of our strategy and execution. This position as a leader is the result of our long-term conviction rather than short-term reaction. Microsoft invested early so organizations would have a mature, scalable real-time foundation exactly when the need became urgent, and that foresight is now paying off for customers.

A Leader for the Real-Time Enterprise

Forrester’s 2025 evaluation confirms a clear market shift: enterprises are moving away from fragmented real-time architectures and toward unified platforms that can support AI-driven decisions at digital speed. As Forrester notes, “AI agents rely on seamless data flow across ingestion, transformation, and real-time insights to avoid bottlenecks and cascading errors. A robust platform unifies these workloads (messaging, processing, analytics), eliminating silos and latency that degrade decision quality.” In this environment, a fully integrated streaming platform has become essential rather than optional.

This is exactly where Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric stands out. Forrester notes that Microsoft’s strategy is to bring dozens of services together under a single umbrella, making real-time development and event-driven analytics “second nature” within Fabric. Real-time data becomes a first-class citizen in Fabric’s unified data estate. Streaming signals land directly into OneLake, the same foundation that powers the lakehouse, warehouse, semantic models, governance, Power BI, and AI agents.

Forrester’s assessment is clear: “Microsoft excels at messaging, analytics, governance, developer experience, business user experience, and more, enabling robust performance for real-time analytics and event-driven applications. It provides seamless integration within the Fabric ecosystem to support enterprise use cases like predictive analytics and operational dashboards. It offers strong tooling for both technical and business users as well as deep integration with Azure services, empowering enterprises to build real-time solutions.”

This recognition reflects a platform designed from the start to work as one coherent system, not a set of loosely assembled services. It is an end-to-end real-time platform that strengthens the entire data estate and positions organizations to run AI-driven operations with clarity, speed, and confidence.

Why Enterprises Are Standardizing on Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

Real-Time Intelligence delivers a complete end-to-end platform for understanding and acting on what is happening across the enterprise in the moment. It unifies signals across time, space, and relationships to provide a connected operational picture rather than isolated dashboards or fragmented telemetry. Every stage of the real-time lifecycle (streaming, analyzing, modeling, visualizing, and acting) is integrated into one governed, AI-ready system. This coherence is what enables teams and AI agents to work from one live, trusted view of the business and make high-quality decisions at digital speed.

The Real-Time Hub is the unified experience that makes every enterprise signal visible, governed, and ready for use. It brings all the capabilities of Real-Time Intelligence together into a coherent operational fabric, the live nervous system of the modern enterprise.

Across five major areas, these capabilities form a complete real-time platform:

• Stream: Eventstream ingests, shapes, filters, and enriches data in motion, while Connectors pulls data from dozens of streaming sources, including Kafka, MQTT, IoT systems, SaaS apps, and CDC feeds. Event Schema Set standardizes events to keep signals consistent, interoperable, and easy to govern.
• Analyze: Real-time and historical insights converge in Eventhouse, a high-performance engine for interactive analytics over petabyte-scale data. Anomaly Detector highlights deviations and emerging risks the moment they appear.
• Model: Fabric’s modeling layer enables unified operational awareness. Graph links signals to entities and relationships, Fabric Map situates them in physical space, and Digital Twin Builder models assets and environments over time.
• Visualize: KQL Querysets enable fast, interactive analytics for exploring data and diagnosing problems, Graph Querysets for relational and causal patterns across the business, and Real-Time Dashboards for intuitive, no-code views of live conditions and trends.
• Act: Activator detects patterns over time on a per-instance basis and triggers alerts or workflows through visual no-code business rules. Operations Agent monitors your operations, reasons about your business, and takes automated actions based on natural language instructions.

How Fabric IQ Completes the Intelligence Layer

We recently introduced Fabric IQ (see blog post), the intelligence layer that transforms unified data into unified understanding for every team and every AI agent. IQ brings a semantic, reasoning-ready foundation to the entire Fabric platform, including Real-Time Intelligence, so organizations can interpret what is happening across their business, not just observe it. It augments human and AI workflows with natural language understanding, contextual reasoning, and a unified live view drawn from both streaming and historical data.

IQ enables natural-language exploration across all your data in Fabric, allowing users to ask questions, investigate anomalies, and understand relationships without writing code. It synthesizes patterns across time, space, and relationships, surfaces anomalies, explains correlations, and identifies root causes. This shift is what elevates Fabric from a data platform to an enterprise intelligence platform, one where insights are generated, connected, and immediately actionable.

IQ amplifies the power of Real-Time Intelligence. Streaming events stop being isolated signals and become part of a live coherent semantic picture: operators can ask why something happened, analysts can explore emerging risks and opportunities, and AI agents can reason over business meaning before taking action. Because IQ relies on the same governance, semantics, and security as the rest of Fabric, the insights it produces are consistent, trustworthy, and grounded in the organization’s shared data estate.

Together, Real-Time Intelligence and IQ create a unified real-time decision system. Real-Time Intelligence senses what is happening in the moment; IQ interprets it and drives the next action. This seamless integration enables enterprises and their AI agents to operate with precision even as conditions change second by second.

Strategic Takeaways for Enterprise Leaders

Real-time intelligence is becoming core to modern enterprise operations, no longer a specialist capability or an add-on component. AI requires up-to-date, contextualized data. Decision systems must unify batch and streaming data. And governance and semantics must extend across the entire data estate, from historical tables to real-time streams, to ensure trust, lineage, compliance, and safe AI behavior.

Microsoft Fabric, with Real-Time Intelligence and IQ, offers a decisive foundation for this new era. It brings together data, meaning, and action in one governed platform. It unifies time, space, and relationships to give enterprises a complete operational picture. And it supports AI-driven decisions at digital speed while strengthening governance, reliability, and trust.

As organizations modernize their data platforms and adopt AI at scale, Fabric provides the clarity, coherence, and confidence they need to run their business in real time and to thrive in the decade ahead.

Statement from Forrester

Forrester does not endorse any company, product, brand, or service included in its research publications and does not advise any person to select the products or services of any company or brand based on the ratings included in such publications. Information is based on the best available resources. Opinions reflect judgment at the time and are subject to change. For more information, read about Forrest’s objectivity here.

Learn More

Presentations

• BRK222: Create a semantic foundation for your AI agents in Microsoft Fabric
• BRK226: Unlock the power of Real-Time Intelligence in the era of AI

Conferences

• Join us at FabCon in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 16-20, 2026. Register and use code MSCATL for a $200 discount on top of the current Early Access pricing!

Resources

• Explore the docs
• Find customer success stories
• Follow a tutorial
• Try an in-depth tutorial
• Complete the learning path
• Get certified
• Sign up for one-day training

The post Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence: A Leader in the 2025 Forrester Streaming Data Wave appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

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

Explore Azure announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2025

Another leap forward across Microsoft Databases and Microsoft Fabric

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

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

Deploy the next generation of Microsoft Databases

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Azure HorizonDB: PostgreSQL designed for your mission-critical workloads

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

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

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Accelerate app development with Fabric SaaS Databases, now generally available

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

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

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

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

All your databases connected into Fabric

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

Getting your data estate ready for AI with Microsoft Fabric

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

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

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

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

Unify your data estate with Microsoft OneLake

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

See how shortcuts and mirroring unify your data in OneLake:

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

Expanding OneLake interoperability with leading data platforms

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

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

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

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

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

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

Create semantic knowledge to fuel AI with Fabric IQ

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

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

Watch the Introducing IQ in Microsoft Fabric video

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mark your calendar for FabCon and SQLCon

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

Register for FabCon and SQLCon now

Watch these announcements in action at Microsoft Ignite

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

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

Tuesday, November 18

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

Wednesday, November 19

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

Thursday, November 20

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

Explore Azure announcements at Microsoft Ignite 2025

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

In this blog post, I’ll highlight the new zero-ETL, zero-copy sources in OneLake, deeper interoperability between OneLake and Microsoft Foundry, and new tools to help admins manage capacity, security, and governance at scale. Together, these updates further cement Fabric as the ideal data platform for your mission-critical workloads—open, integrated, secure, and built to connect every part of your data estate to the intelligence your business needs. 

What I’m covering here is only part of the story. For a deeper look at our new workload called Fabric IQ, new bidirectional interoperability with SAP and Salesforce, the general availability of Fabric Databases, and several other major announcements, I encourage you to read the Azure Data announcement blog from Arun Ulag, President of Azure Data. 

Unify your entire data estate with Microsoft OneLake

With Microsoft OneLake, you can access your entire multi-cloud and on-premises data estate through a single, unified data lake that spans your organization. Once connected, your data is centrally managed through the OneLake catalog—a unified layer for access, governance, security, and discovery. Today, the OneLake catalog is trusted by more than 230,000 organizations worldwide, including 95% of the Fortune 500, and is seamlessly accessible from familiar tools like Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Teams. 

Now, we’re introducing new capabilities that make it even easier to bring all your data into OneLake, connect it to intelligent agents, and manage it with stronger governance and security. 

New mirroring and shortcuts sources for SAP, Microsoft 365, and Azure Databases

We’re excited to introduce new ways to unify your data in OneLake with a zero-ETL approach. Mirroring for PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, and SQL Server versions 2016-2022 and 2025, are now generally available. We are also announcing the preview of Mirroring for SAP, powered by SAP Datasphere, which enables seamless data replication from SAP systems into OneLake. This is in addition to our announcement of bidirectional integration with SAP BDC. Whether you’ve adopted SAP BDC or not, you can now access your SAP data in OneLake. We’re also bringing Iceberg support in Snowflake mirroring into general availability. By mirroring these sources, you can eliminate the need for ETL processes and get Delta tables optimized for analytics. Try these mirroring sources today or learn more in the Data Integration Blog. 

We are also announcing the preview of shortcuts to SharePoint and OneDrive, allowing you to bring your unstructured, productivity data into OneLake without copying files or building custom ETL flows. You can use these unstructured files to train agents or to provide relevant context alongside your structured data. And, as business users make changes to their spreadsheets, documents, and PDFs in SharePoint and OneDrive, the files in OneLake always remain up to date. Try these shortcuts today.

Connect your multi-cloud data estate to agents with Foundry IQ 

Today, Microsoft announced Foundry IQ by Azure AI Search: the next generation of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Agents rely on context— Foundry IQ’s knowledge bases deliver high-value context to agents by simplifying access to multiple data sources and making connections across information. You can use the OneLake knowledge source in Foundry IQ to connect agents to multi-cloud sources like AWS S3, on-premises sources, and structured and unstructured data across your data estate—all without creating copies or introducing data sprawl. With knowledge bases in Foundry IQ, your AI developers can build agents that are grounded in curated, governed data from Microsoft 365 Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and the web for more accurate app responses and informed decision-making. Try the Foundry IQ knowledge base today. 

Take a look at how you can use shortcuts and mirroring to bring all your data sources together in OneLake and use it to power the next generation of intelligent agents in Foundry:  

Enhancing governance for admins and data security in the OneLake catalog 

Over the last year, we’ve expanded the OneLake catalog to become the central place to discover, manage, govern, and secure your data in Fabric. Today, we are expanding its capabilities even further.

We are also upgrading the OneLake catalog Govern tab with a new preview experience designed for admins. From a centralized dashboard, Fabric admins can now view out-of-the-box insights on domain and capacity inventory, workspace operations, protection status, and curation. They can dive deeper with detailed Power BI reports, take recommended actions to quickly resolve issues, or even chat with Copilot to better understand the insights—all in one place. We are also expanding Copilot’s capabilities to automatically generate summaries for semantic models with a single click, providing quick insights and improving your exploration and decision making.

We are also releasing new ReadWrite permissions for OneLake security, allowing teams to configure folder-level write access within lakehouses so contributors can write data without needing full contributor or higher roles in the workspace. Learn how to start using OneLake security. 

Together, all of these enhancements make OneLake not just a data lake, but a strategic control plane for enterprise data—curated, connected, and ready for AI. Whether you’re building agents, dashboards, or operational workflows, OneLake helps ensure your data is always where you need it, when you need it, and in the format that drives action. 

Confidently deploy and manage the Fabric platform with new network security features and capacity management tools

As you scale your data operations with Fabric, reliability and security are non-negotiable. With that in mind, we are announcing new capabilities designed to help you maintain uninterrupted performance during peak demand and uncompromising protection for sensitive data. 

Expanded network security controls for your Fabric workloads 

On the security front, Outbound Access Protection—which allows you to restrict outbound connections to only approved endpoints—is being extended to cover dataflows, data pipelines, and OneLake shortcuts, in addition to the recently announced coverage for Fabric data warehouses and SQL Analytics Endpoints. While these extensions will be in preview in early 2026, OAP support for Spark and SQL Analytics Endpoints is already generally available. Coming soon, we are also releasing Tenant API for OAP, allowing tenant admins the ability to see the workspaces which have OAP enabled. 

We also recently released Customer-Managed Keys into general availability, empowering organizations to encrypt their data using their own keys. Now we are extending Customer Managed Keys to support keys stored in Azure Key Vaults deployed behind a firewall and use in SQL Databases in Fabric, now in preview.  

New Fabric capacity tools to help you optimize costs and avoid throttling  

To help you gain control over the jobs running on your Fabric capacities, we are expanding surge protection and introducing a new tool called Fabric capacity overage—both of which will be released into preview in Q1 2026—and adding Fabric capacity events in the Real-Time hub. First, surge protection will now let you set limits on specific workspace activity to protect your capacities from unexpected surges from non-critical workspaces.  

We are also releasing Fabric capacity overage which admins can turn on for specific capacities, allowing them to automatically pay for excess consumption and avoid throttling whenever high-traffic periods occur. Rather than over-provisioning for rare spikes, you can right-size your capacity for typical usage and enable overage only when needed. Admins can even set a 24-hour limit so you don’t break your budget, and the feature can be toggled on or off in seconds. These tools are designed to work together to help you prevent over-use and maintain smooth, uninterrupted operations even during peak demand.

Finally, we’re excited to announce we are adding Fabric capacity events in the Real-Time hub. It’s a highly requested feature now in preview that provides the ability to analyze capacity events in real-time and respond appropriately. Fabric capacity events will provide real-time data for two event types: Capacity Summary (smoothed metrics every 30 seconds) and Capacity State (instant updates on changes like pauses or throttling).  

See more Microsoft Fabric innovation  

At Ignite, we announced several transformative enhancements to Microsoft Fabric that will help organizations unify their data estates and power the next generation of AI apps and agents. We’re introducing the preview of Fabric IQ, a new workload in Fabric that unifies your data with operational systems under a semantic model of business entities and their relationships—providing a live, connected view of the enterprise. We are announcing the general availability of SQL and Cosmos databases in Fabric, giving developers world-class database engines that provision in seconds—and deliver a simple, autonomous, secure, and AI-optimized foundation for modern applications.

We are also expanding interoperability with SAP, Salesforce, Azure Databricks, and Snowflake to enable bi-directional, zero-copy data sharing between their platforms and Fabric. Finally, we are weaving AI into the places you work every day with enhancements to Fabric data agents, Copilot in Power BI, and Fabric operations agents. To dive deeper into these milestone innovations, read the Azure Data announcement blog from Arun Ulag, President of Azure Data. 

You can also learn more about everything else we are bringing to Fabric by reading the Fabric November 2025 Feature summary blog, the Power BI November feature summary blog, or by exploring the latest blogs on the Fabric Updates channel.  

Join us at FabCon Atlanta  

Looking for a dedicated event on Microsoft Fabric? Join us at the 3^rd annual Fabric Community Conference this year in Atlanta, Georgia from March 16-20, 2026, for even more in-depth sessions, cutting-edge demos and announcements, community networking, and everything else you love about FabCon. And we are ecstatic that SQLCon 2026 is now officially part of the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, bringing together two powerhouse communities in SQL and Fabric.  

You can Register today for either event or get full access to both. And use code MSCATL for a $200 discount on top of current Early Access pricing!

Challenge yourself and get certified in Microsoft Fabric 

Unify your data, unlock real-time insights, and kickstart your journey to becoming a certified Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer—join the DP-600 Skills Challenge today.  

Build smarter pipelines, unify your data estate, and take the next step toward DP-700 certification—start the Microsoft Fabric Data Engineer Skills Challenge today.  

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric 

• Sign up for the Fabric free trial. 
• View the updated Fabric Roadmap. 
• Try the Microsoft Fabric SKU Estimator. 
• Visit the Fabric website. 
• Join the Fabric community. 
• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog. 

Read additional blogs by industry-leading partners: 

•  Microsoft Fabric Latest Upgrades: What’s New in 2025? by Kanerika Inc. 
• Workforce Optimization with Microsoft Fabric Data Agent by Smartbridge 
• Let’s get real: Real business outcomes with Microsoft Fabric’s Real-Time Intelligence by Valtech 
• Finance at the Speed of Innovation by Protiviti 
• 6 Things You Should Know About Translytical Task Flows by Nimble Learn 
• Autonomous Finance: How Agentic AI and Fabric Will Reshape CFO Strategy by Data Driven AI 
• From ELT to Effortless: Building a Microsoft Fabric Medallion Architecture Without Code by Cloud Direct 
• Microsoft Fabric Databases – Unifying Transactions and Analytics for the Modern Data Estate by Cloud Services 
• Understanding from the CIO’s Point of View an Analysis of Governance and Security in Microsoft Fabric by Celebal Technologies Pvt Ltd. 

The post What’s new in OneLake and the Fabric platform: more sources, security, and capacity tooling appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

That’s why Microsoft and Snowflake have been working side by side to make open, cross-platform integration effortless. Over the past 18 months, our collaboration has focused on one shared goal: helping customers connect Snowflake and Microsoft OneLake to access, analyze, and share data without duplication or complexity.

Built on open standards like Apache Iceberg and Parquet, this collaboration lets organizations use a single copy of data across both platforms and choose the right tool for every task. The result is a more flexible, efficient, and unified data experience—no matter where your data originates.

To learn more about how this interoperability works, check out our recent Microsoft and Snowflake: Delivering on the promise of openness and interoperability blog post.

Microsoft Ignite: Announcing enhanced interoperability between Microsoft and Snowflake

We’re excited to share new advancements that make the Microsoft–Snowflake integration even easier to use and more powerful.

We’ve added new, intuitive user interface (UI) experiences in both platforms to simplify setup and use. OneLake is adding a Snowflake-branded item in preview, allowing users to seamlessly access all Snowflake data within Microsoft Fabric without requiring further configuration. This means you can use any Fabric workload—analytics, AI, or visualization—directly on Snowflake data, without extra configuration.

Snowflake is also introducing new UI capabilities designed to let OneLake serve as the native storage location for your Snowflake data. This means all of your data can reside in OneLake, while taking advantage of Snowflake’s powerful engines.

Take a look at this new UI in action below and get started today.

How does this add to Microsoft’s existing interoperability?

We’ve already been able to deliver bidirectional data sharing between Snowflake and OneLake, for seamless interoperability between our platforms without data duplication. Customers can already write Snowflake tables directly to OneLake, access Apache Iceberg tables using OneLake shortcuts, and read OneLake tables from Snowflake—all without duplication or complex setup.

What we’ve already delivered:

• General Availability
  • Automatic translation of Iceberg metadata to Delta Lake metadata for use with all Microsoft Fabric engines.
  • Shortcut Snowflake Iceberg data (in Azure, Amazon S3, or GCS) directly into OneLake.
• Preview
  • Native storage of Snowflake Iceberg data in OneLake.
  • Automatic conversion of Fabric data into Iceberg format for seamless use in Snowflake.
  • New OneLake table APIs that work with Snowflake’s catalog-linked database feature.

And with the new UI now rolling out, we are making the existing interoperability easier to implement for your teams.

Looking ahead to unified, cross-platform data access and management

Looking ahead to 2026, our goal is to make all these capabilities generally available, so that even your most mission-critical workloads can take advantage of unified, cross-platform data access and management.

But beyond our existing interoperability, we are committed to continue removing barriers between our platforms, so you have full optionality for your data projects.

Still have questions about the integration?

Watch the recent Ask me Anything: Fabric and Snowflake Interoperability webinar where experts from Microsoft OneLake and Snowflake answered top questions on how to most effectively use these platforms together.

The post Microsoft and Snowflake: Simplified interoperability with no data movement appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

We’re thrilled to unveil SQLCon 2026, the premier Microsoft SQL Community Conference, co-located with the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference (FabCon) from March 16–20, 2026! 

This year, we’re bringing the best of both worlds under one roof—uniting the vibrant SQL and Fabric communities for a truly next-level experience. Whether you’re passionate about SQL Server, Azure SQL, SQL in Fabric, SQL Tools, migration and modernization, database security, or building AI-powered apps with SQL, SQLCon 2026 has you covered. Dive into 50+ breakout sessions and 4 expert-led workshops designed to help you optimize, innovate, and connect. 

Why are SQLCon + FabCon better together? 

• One registration, double the value: Register for either conference and get full access to both—mix and match sessions, keynotes, and community events to fit your interests. 
• Shared spaces, shared energy: Enjoy the same expo hall, registration desk, conference app, and community lounge. Network with peers across the data platform spectrum. 
• Unforgettable experiences: Join us for both keynotes at the State Farm Arena and celebrate at the legendary attendee party at the Georgia Aquarium. 

Our goal is to reignite the SQL Community spirit—restoring the robust networks, friendships, and career-building opportunities that make this ecosystem so special. SQLCon is just the beginning of a renewed commitment to connect at conferences, user groups, online, and at regional events. 

Early Access Pricing Extended! 
Register by November 14th and save $200 with code SQLCMTY200. 
Register Now! 

Want to share your expertise? 
The Call for Content is open until November 20th for both conferences! 

Let’s build the future of data—together. See you at SQLCon + FabCon! 

The post Announcing SQLCon 2026: Better Together with FabCon! appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

As our second annual event, the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference brought more than 4,000 attendees to a sold-out event in Vienna. The week opened with a partner pre-day, followed by an executive track that gave senior leaders exclusive access to Microsoft leadership. On the main stage, our keynotes set the tone with the latest Fabric announcements that drew coverage across InfoWorld, SiliconANGLE, TechTarget, The Register, VentureBeat, The Neuron, and Le Monde.

With 130+ sessions, 11 full-day workshops, a vibrant community lounge, and dozens of expert-led booths, FabCon Vienna gave customers and partners the chance to learn, connect, and see how Fabric is transforming organizations worldwide. The event highlighted innovations, partnerships, and customer success shaping the future of data and AI. Let’s take a look at some of the best moments.

Day 1 keynote

The conference kicked off with a big welcome from Arun Ulag, Corporate Vice President of Azure Data as well as a video welcome from Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. Arun and Satya highlighted the incredible customer momentum Fabric is experiencing, capped by appearances from Christian Meyers, Head of Platforms for Siemens AG and Gijs Thieme, Chief Data and Analytics Officer for KPN. This was followed by an action-packed segment led by Amir Netz, CTO of Microsoft Fabric where he and the product team unveiled the latest innovations coming to Microsoft Fabric.

Highlights included our new OneLake enhancements with Oracle and Google BigQuery mirroring (preview), Graph and Maps in Fabric (preview) to unlock connected and geospatial insights, and expanded developer tooling with the Fabric Extensibility Toolkit, Model Context Protocol, and deeper Git/VS Code integration. Furthermore, we shared announcements related to the latest enterprise-grade advancements in Fabric security such as Azure Private Link, customer-managed keys, and Synapse migration capabilities, plus new partner solutions from ESRI, Lumel, and Neo4j.

For a deeper dive into these announcements, watch the full Microsoft Fabric keynote or read FabCon Vienna: Build data-rich agents on an enterprise-ready foundation.

Day 2 keynote

Day two expanded the spotlight to the Fabric ecosystem, with senior Microsoft leaders showing how Fabric unifies databases, governance, and AI to help organizations on their journey to become AI Frontier Firms. Jessica Hawk opened the session by introducing the Frontier Firm framework and why every organization should consider its roadmap to becoming one. Shireesh Thota followed with a vision for how databases powering modern AI apps must offer the deployment flexibility of both PaaS and SaaS to meet the exploding demand for data.

Kim Manis then demonstrated how Fabric’s deeply integrated governance, security, and compliance stack, from the data center to M365, enables organizations to confidently manage and secure data access. Closing out the keynote portion, Marco Casalaina showcased how Azure AI services deliver real-time capabilities like translations and how Azure AI Foundry integrates with Fabric to bring data-specific skills to customer AI agents and enable low-code agents built in Copilot Studio.

FabCon TV

We were thrilled to introduce FabCon TV to the programming for the first time at FabCon Vienna. This new platform brought expert-led content live to a studio audience, with all segments recorded to share with our global community in the months ahead. Many of the Fabric Tech Talk Fridays (F2T2) episodes were also filmed on the FabCon TV stage, giving the community a unique opportunity to experience their favorite weekly series live.

Whether you want to relive FabCon highlights or catch up on F2T2 deep dives, FabCon TV will be the hub for ongoing learning and inspiration.

FabCon Community Lounge

The Community Lounge was once again a hub of connection and learning, bringing together MVPs, Super Users, and User Group Leaders for meetups, Q&A sessions, and community-led discussions. Attendees enjoyed interactive experiences like the “Fast at Fabric” challenge, sticker scavenger hunts, and a collaborative coloring wall, all designed to spark participation while promoting skilling and certification opportunities.

Swag was earned through intentional activities such as joining user groups or subscribing to community blogs, making engagement both fun and rewarding. The lounge also hosted a Diversity & Inclusion lunch, highlighted Microsoft Learn certifications, and featured live MVP sessions and giveaways, reinforcing its role as a central space for skilling, networking, and community growth. Keep the momentum going by joining the Fabric Community.

To celebrate FabCon Vienna, we’re offering all community members a 50% discount on exams DP-600, DP-700, DP-900, and PL-300. Request your voucher before October 3!

Additional highlights from FabCon Vienna 2025

Beyond the keynotes and sessions, FabCon Vienna 2025 delivered memorable moments that blended innovation with community spirit, including:

• Hands-on exploration with unique experiences like a high-octane racing simulator powered by Fabric Real-Time Intelligence and expert-staffed booths for direct Q&A.
• Community competitions and creativity were highlighted by the DataViz World Championship, where data storytellers competed for the crown.
• A milestone celebration marking the 10th anniversary of Microsoft Power BI, honoring a decade of impact and innovation in analytics.
• Unparalleled connections with Microsoft product leaders, MVPs, partners, and peers, strengthening relationships across the global Fabric community.
• An exclusive, sold-out executive track offered senior leaders direct access to Microsoft executives, curated sessions, and peer-to-peer learning, capped by a memorable evening at a historic Viennese palace.
• Power Hour delivered fun and creativity with live Fabric and Azure demos, the crowd-favorite Fabric Family Feud (Engineering vs. Marketing), and limited-edition Lego Power BI birthday sets, cementing it as a must-see FabCon tradition.

Join us at FabCon Atlanta and Microsoft Ignite

Mark your calendars! The next FabCon is coming to my hometown in Atlanta, Georgia, from March 16 to 20, 2026. I’m thrilled to see the Fabric community come together here for even more in-depth sessions, cutting-edge demos and announcements, and the networking that makes FabCon so special. Register today and use code MSCATL for a $200 discount on top of current early access pricing!

In the meantime, join us at Microsoft Ignite 2025. From November 18 to 21, 2025, experience the latest innovations across Microsoft Fabric and the full Microsoft Cloud live from San Francisco, the iconic hub of technology and culture, or join us online. We look forward to seeing you there.

And don’t stop there—hack the future of data and AI with Fabric. Compete in the Microsoft Fabric FabCon Global Hackathon for your chance to win up to $10,000! Running through November 3.

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

• Register for FabCon Atlanta.
• Sign up for the Fabric free trial.
• View the updated Fabric Roadmap.
• Try the Microsoft Fabric SKU Estimator.
• Visit the Fabric website.
• Join the Fabric community.
• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog.

The post FabCon Europe: Highlights from the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2025 appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

A decade ago, we faced the same issues with document sharing. Sharing documents with your coworkers meant emailing attachments or managing files on local network drives. Then, cloud services like OneDrive and Dropbox transformed document sharing and collaboration by providing a single, accessible home for files. In the data realm, a similar transformation is happening now with OneLake.

Instead of the patchwork of storage accounts and ad-hoc data marts scattered across departments, organizations need a single, unified access point for all their data. Now with Microsoft OneLake, we have the solution. With OneLake, you can access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single data lake that spans the entire organization. Similar to how OneDrive is wired into all your Microsoft 365 applications and provides a convenient storage location, OneLake acts as the central, accessible location for comprehensive data access and management.​

In this blog post, we’ll explore why OneLake is the ideal data lake to unify your data estate and help you create AI applications, focusing on five key pillars: breaking down silos, connecting to all your data, working from a single data copy, discovering and managing in a data catalog, and sharing data with granular security.

Breaking down siloes with a unified data foundation

Traditionally, every department, team, and even project in an organization creates their own siloed data stores to maintain data ownership and granular control over security and compliance. The result, however, is a fragmented patchwork of ‘data islands’. This siloed system can’t keep up with fast paced data projects, especially as frontier firms start deploying agents across the organization that need access to cross-department data.

Instead, you can deploy OneLake as the central data access point for the entire organization. Every Microsoft Fabric tenant comes with just a single OneLake instance, with no additional infrastructure to manage. Every department, team, and project can store or connect their data to a single unified data lake and then use a system of Fabric domains, sub-domains, and workspaces—each with their own administrator—to organize their data into a logical data mesh. This system maintains data ownership and allows for federated governance while ensuring authorized users can discover and use data from other domains without friction. Watch this video to see how you can set up your own logical data mesh in OneLake:

By consolidating data access to one place, OneLake dramatically simplifies data sharing and integration. When a data project requires data from multiple departments, users can query and combine data from multiple domains directly in OneLake rather than requesting exports or setting up complex pipeline jobs. And OneLake’s reach isn’t limited to Azure, it can virtualize data from across your other clouds and will appear just like any other data item in OneLake.

Connect to any data, anywhere without duplication

With your data mesh in OneLake organized, you then have the tools to connect to all of the data sources in your data estate. Most data estates naturally span multiple clouds, accounts, databases, domains, and engines, and data professionals spend half their time trying to connect data sources to incompatible platforms or updating their out-of-date data with complex data pipelines. With OneLake, we’ve simplified how you bring data in with a zero-copy, zero-ETL approach with two key Fabric capabilities: shortcuts and mirroring.

OneLake shortcuts enable your data teams to virtualize data in OneLake without having to move and duplicate it. They act essentially as metadata pointers, similar to a shortcut on your desktop. This capability is particularly adept at helping you break down siloes across your data estate and even between OneLake domains. You can create shortcuts to data which lives in another domain or workspace, while ensuring only one copy of the data exists. Shortcuts even preserve data ownership and governance across domains, meaning if you update your data item or restrict access to it, all users who’ve bypassed to the data will instantly see the change. With shortcut transformations, you can even apply automatic changes to the data like converting the data format or removing PII data. We have shortcuts available for OneLake, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Blob storage, Amazon S3 and S3 compatible sources, Iceberg-compatible sources, Microsoft Dataverse, on-premises sources, and more on their way.

You can also use mirroring, a no-ETL experience to add proprietary databases or data warehouses to Fabric. Depending on the data source, mirroring can either replicate the entire database or just the metadata in OneLake in Delta Parquet tables and keep the data in sync in near real time. We currently have Mirroring enabled for Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL DB, Azure SQL MI, Azure PostgreSQL, Azure Databricks Unity Catalog, Snowflake, and many more sources coming soon including SQL Server, SQL Server 2025, Oracle, and Dataverse. With Open Mirroring, you can even create custom mirroring experiences for your own applications.

Check out this quick demo of these features in action:

The benefits of these innovative, no-ETL options are massive. No more cumbersome ETL pipelines, no more sprawling, out-of-date copies of the data, and no more data siloes across every part of your business. Once your data is connected to OneLake, you only need a single copy across every engine.

Collaborate on a single copy of data with open formats

When we built OneLake and the Fabric engines, we designed them to support open data formats, standardizing on both the Delta Parquet and Apache Iceberg formats. This commitment to common open data formats means that you need to load your data into OneLake once and all the Fabric engines can operate on the same data, without having to separately ingest it. Having only one copy of the data means teams can collaborate on a single source of truth rather than fragmenting information into endless copies in each stage of the analytics journey.

Creating multiple copies of the same data not only wastes storage space but also leads to version mismatch. By eliminating redundant copies, OneLake ensures everyone is working from the most up to date version of the data without refresh delays or manual syncs. Instead of marketing and finance creating separate copies of a lakehouse with customer revenue data, they can work from the same data with different metadata, filters, and BI reports added. IT teams can spend less time maintaining complex pipelines and admins only have one copy to manage with far easier audit trails to follow. Moreover, data professionals can easily pick the engine they most prefer, whether its T-SQL or Spark, knowing all the engines are optimized for Delta Parquet and will work from the same copy.

Everyone operates on the same single version of truth, from a data scientist training a model to an executive reviewing a dashboard, driving a more aligned and efficient organization.

Discover, manage, and govern in a complete catalog

Minimizing data duplication and sprawl also requires ensuring the right people can find and explore the right data. The benefits of a data culture have been clear for years, but with generative AI the potential business impact is increasing exponentially. Frontier firms are already using AI assistants and building custom agents to transform how their teams interact with data from technical professionals creating data items and drafting code to business users quickly answering their pressing data questions. But crucially, this culture requires that everyone has the ability to discover high quality data.

That’s where the OneLake catalog comes in. We’ve designed the OneLake catalog to be the single place for data professionals and business users to discover, manage, and govern the data they own and can access across OneLake. With over 30M monthly active Power BI and Fabric users, it’s already the default source of data and insights for many business users. 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 insights for data owners.

Instead of searching through a maze of databases or SharePoint sites, users can use the Explore tab and even narrow their search by domain, workspace, item type, endorsements, and more to find exactly what they need in seconds. You can then deep dive into a data item to see its description, owner, schema, lineage, and usage metrics. We’ve also integrated OneLake catalog everywhere your people work including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Copilot Studio, and 100s of other scenarios—bringing data access to the 350 million Microsoft 365 users.

In the Govern tab, data owners can get out of the box insights and recommended actions based on the curation and quality level of their data based on sensitivity label coverage, tagging, endorsements, data location, and more.

Check out the full demo of the OneLake catalog:

Share broadly with granular security and control

However, while broad access to data is critical for empowering the business, security leaders know that cyber-attacks are becoming more sophisticated, and the average cost of a single breach is nearing $10 million. Traditionally, the response is to lock down access to only trusted users, but our research tells us that 63% of data breaches stem from inadvertent, negligent or malicious insiders. The reality is people will try to work around lock down controls using tools like Excel which are harder to govern, less transparent, and harder to maintain.

That’s why we’ve designed OneLake security—an experience designed to help you share data across your organization without exposing sensitive information. With OneLake security, you can create roles to set permissions at the data item, folder, table, or even row/column level, enabling you to still share a data item while restricting access to any sensitive data your item may contain. These permissions are then automatically enforced across all analytics experiences, so whether a user is querying data through a Spark notebook, viewing it in a Power BI report, or exploring it through a Fabric data agent, OneLake’s security model ensures they see only what they’re permitted.

Check out this visual to see how OneLake security works:

This unified approach to security means users no longer have to maintain separate permissions across different engines. It also means the original data owners always maintain control over who can access the data source, even if the data is bypassed to another lakehouse or workspace owned by someone else. The end result is that data sharing can be done safely, knowing you have the fine-grained controls in place.

Check out this full overview video:

On top of this built-in security, you can also leverage the same security features from tools like Microsoft 365 with Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels and Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies. Technical and non-technical users alike can apply sensitivity labels to classify their data items, automatically restricting access based on the data item’s sensitivity even when the data exported to other tools like Microsoft Excel. DLP policies will also automatically detect when sensitive data is uploaded to unauthorized destinations, alerting users and offering guidance to mitigate risks.

In short, OneLake’s security model means you get the benefit of broad data accessibility and self-service analytics without sacrificing oversight and control. Together, these capabilities provide a unified, enterprise-grade framework for securing data, enabling responsible AI use, and ensuring compliance across the OneLake environment.

Building data-driven agents with curated data from OneLake

Creating custom AI experiences requires data—lots of it. Data is the foundation on which AI is built, and the simple fact is AI is only as good as the data it’s based on. For generative AI solutions to be as accurate as possible, they need to be built with clean data and in a semi-structured way. With your data in OneLake, you can use Fabric’s various workloads to make the data AI-ready. Fabric has tools for data integration and engineering, data warehousing, data science, real-time analytics, data modeling and visualization, and even has native, industry-specific and partner-created workloads to help you accelerate your data projects.

You can then directly connect your data to AI platforms like Azure AI Foundry to build and scale data-driven GenAI apps. We’ve built native integration between OneLake and Azure AI Foundry to make this as seamless as possible. The integration between Azure AI Foundry and OneLake is built on OneLake shortcuts, helping you work with your structured and unstructured data from OneLake in Azure AI Foundry without creating copies and adding more data sprawl. OneLake also directly integrates with Azure AI Search, which can store, index, and retrieve data, including vector embeddings, from your data sources including OneLake. 

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

Check out this full demo:

Conclusion: A unified data lake for your entire organization

Microsoft OneLake is more than just a new tool—it’s the strategic centerpiece of a data estate that can reshape how an organization harnesses data. By unifying data in one place and breaking down silos, it can become the single point for all your users to discover and explore your organization’s data organized into a logical data mesh. With shortcuts and mirroring in OneLake, you can unify all of your multi-cloud and on-premise sources and enable your people to work from a single copy of data—meaning fewer copies of data, better collaboration between your teams, and more streamlined analysis. By enabling collaboration on a single copy of data, it ensures every decision is based on the same facts, eliminating the version control and governance nightmares.

Organizations like Lumen, IFS, NTT Data, and the Chalhoub Group have all adopted Microsoft OneLake and Microsoft Fabric to unify ingestion, storage, and analytics in one platform. Using OneLake shortcuts, mirroring, Direct Lake mode, and more, Lumen—a leader in enterprise connectivity—cut 10,000 hours of manual effort, “We used to spend up to six hours a day copying data into SQL servers,” says Chad Hollingsworth, Cloud Architect at Lumen. “Now it’s all streamlined… OneLake allowed us to ingest once and use anywhere.” IFS, a leading provider of enterprise software, faced high costs and complexity from a fragmented data architecture. The company unified their data estate on Microsoft OneLake, increasing data access from 20% to more than 85%, cut costs, and accelerated insights, “the primary challenge we faced was the slow pace of development caused by managing separate extract, transform, load (ETL) processes and reporting environments,” said Ligy Terrance, Director of Data Analytics and Integration at IFS. “With Microsoft Fabric, we now have a unified platform that brings all these layers together… Having everything in one place has eliminated integration bottlenecks and made it much easier to deliver insights quickly and efficiently.”

For organizations trying to manage their ever-growing data estate, the implications are significant. OneLake’s approach translates to less data sprawl and lower total costs, less time spent by IT maintaining complex data pipelines and by users looking for data, and faster time to insights for data professionals. With its robust security and governance story, you can help ensure your data is secure while empowering your users with decision-changing data.

Learn more about how OneLake can work with your data estate

Join us for a series of blog posts over the next few months as we explore why Microsoft OneLake is the ideal data platform for the entire data estate. We’ll walk you through how OneLake integrates with each of these platforms, highlight top opportunities and use cases, and feature customers who’ve successfully transformed their existing solutions with OneLake. Check back to the Fabric blog site to find the latest blogs or bookmark this blog and we will update the list below with links to the relevant blogs.

We are planning the following topics:

1. OneLake and Microsoft Foundry: Build data-driven agents with curated data from OneLake
2. OneLake and Snowflake: Snowflake and Microsoft announce expansion of their partnership
3. OneLake catalog overview: OneLake catalog: The trusted catalog for organizations worldwide
4. OneLake and Azure Databases: Coming soon
5. OneLake and Azure Databricks: Microsoft and Databricks: Advancing Openness and Interoperability with OneLake
6. OneLake and Azure Data Factory: Coming soon
7. OneLake and Microsoft 365: Coming soon
8. OneLake and Microsoft Copilot Studio: Coming soon
9. OneLake and open-source solutions: Coming soon

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