This year is especially meaningful, as it marks the return of a Microsoft‑led SQL community event, while also showcasing how SQL continues to evolve as a critical part of Fabric. It is not just about new technology, but about reconnecting with each other and building the future of SQL together.

It’s inspiring to see the Microsoft SQL community continue to grow and engage, with user groups worldwide keeping conversations active across the SQL portfolio and a lot of customers using Microsoft SQL to innovate every day. With a comprehensive portfolio built on strategic common foundations and available across edge, PaaS, and SaaS, Microsoft databases form a unified platform for modern enterprise needs, whether you are migrating and modernizing, building cloud-native AI applications, or unifying your data.

Learn more about what’s happening at SQLCon
Migrate and modernize with Azure SQL
Many of our customers are not modernizing in one big leap. You are evolving from SQL Server to hybrid and then to cloud services, and you want that journey to feel familiar, predictable, and low risk. That is exactly what Azure SQL is designed to deliver. Built on a consistent Microsoft SQL foundation from on premises to the cloud, Azure SQL brings AI capabilities directly into your database experience, along with enterprise‑grade security, high availability, and the flexibility to scale as your needs grow. Azure SQL is fully SQL compatible, delivers strong performance and low latency, and supports hybrid scenarios through Azure Arc.

AI agents are becoming an important accelerator for database migration and modernization at Microsoft, helping our customers reduce manual effort and move faster with more guided experiences across the journey. The general availability of GitHub Copilot in SSMS 22 is a great example of that investment in action: you can use the same GitHub Copilot experience you already use in Visual Studio and VS Code, now inside SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), with chat and code assistance that helps you write, edit, and refactor T‑SQL more quickly and confidently. Whether you are a developer or database administrator (DBA), new to SQL or highly experienced, GitHub Copilot can support common workflows like improving queries and assisting with troubleshooting and administration tasks right where you work, and we are continuing to expand what it can do.

Today we are announcing savings plan for databases, a flexible, spend-based pricing option that helps you save up to 35%1 vs. pay-as-you-go prices on a one-year commitment. Savings plan for databases is designed for modern, evolving database environments: Customers commit to a fixed hourly spend for one year and receive lower prices across eligible Azure database services. Savings are automatically applied to the highest-value usage each hour, helping reduce costs while supporting migration, modernization, and architectural change.

Build cloud-native AI apps at scale
Once you move to the cloud, the questions shift. How do you build faster, scale smarter, and unlock more value from your data without re‑architecting everything you have already built? That is where Azure SQL Database Hyperscale comes in.

With Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, customers gain better price-performance, elastic scale and resilience for any workload, without the cost or disruption of rewriting T‑SQL or reworking operational models. Its unique architecture, built on shared storage and multiple replicas, allows you to scale reads independently from writes. With built‑in HTAP isolation, applications can handle massive transactional and analytical workloads without complex redesign. New capabilities now in public preview extend that foundation even further, including the SQL MCP Server for securely connecting SQL data to AI agents and Copilots, as well as larger 160 and 192 vCore options for high‑throughput workloads.

We’re delivering faster, more capable vector indexes to power AI applications. Recent enhancements improve vector search performance and efficiency with no code changes required. With full insert, update, and delete support, vector indexes stay current in real time, enabling dynamic applications. Features like quantization, iterative filtering, and tighter query optimizer integration provide faster, more predictable results, helping teams build responsive AI experiences directly on their SQL data.

Temenos built its next‑generation banking platform, Temenos Core, on Azure using Azure SQL Database Hyperscale to achieve global scale, high availability, and resilient performance. The platform processes billions of transactions daily and more than 17,500 transactions per second at peak. By building on Hyperscale, Temenos reduced onboarding time, accelerated innovation, and shifted banks from worrying about downtime to competing on availability and digital innovation.

Unify your data estate with SQL database in Fabric
We continue to raise the bar on enterprise readiness for SQL database in Fabric by bringing enterprise-grade security and compliance capabilities directly into the platform. Today at SQLCon, we announced the general availability of features including SQL Auditing, Customer‑Managed Keys, and Dynamic Data Masking, and the preview of workspace‑level Private Link. We brought these enhancements to help customers meet strict governance and regulatory requirements without adding operational complexity. The result is confidence that your SQL workloads in Fabric are secure, compliant, and ready for production.

SQL database in Fabric is becoming even more powerful for AI‑driven applications. The same vector indexing enhancements available in Azure SQL Database Hyperscale are now built into SQL database in Fabric as well. Because both are powered by the same Microsoft SQL engine, customers benefit from consistent performance, capabilities, and innovation across the SQL portfolio—making it easier to build intelligent applications wherever their data lives.

Finally, moving to SQL database in Fabric is simpler than ever. The Migration Assistant now supports SQL database in Fabric as a target destination. It provides a Copilot-assisted experience that helps SQL developers assess readiness, migrate schema, identify compatibility issues, and copy data with less manual effort. By preserving familiar SQL skills and workflows, customers can modernize at their own pace while accelerating time to value on Fabric’s unified analytics and AI platform.

Learn more about SQL database in Fabric
There is one more Fabric innovation that matters deeply for how we deliver Microsoft databases as a unified platform. As applications grow more sophisticated, most organizations now rely on a mix of SQL and NoSQL databases across cloud, on‑premises, and edge environments. Provisioning, monitoring, and maintaining health across a growing database fleet often requires multiple tools and portals, making it harder to see what’s happening and manage at scale.

To address this, we are introducing the Database Hub in Microsoft Fabric, now available in early access. The Database Hub provides a unified database management experience that brings together databases across edge, cloud, and Fabric into one coherent view. From a single place, database teams can explore, observe, govern, and optimize their entire estate, including Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Database for PostgreSQL, SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc, and Azure Database for MySQL without changing how each service is deployed or operated.

Built for scale, the Database Hub introduces an agent-assisted, human-in-the-loop approach to database management. Intelligent agents continuously reason over estate-wide signals to surface what changed, explain why it matters, and guide teams toward what to do next, while built-in observability, delegated governance, and Copilot-powered insights help teams move from insight to action with greater confidence. With the Database Hub, teams spend less time navigating tools and more time enabling what comes next: unlocking deeper integration across applications, analytics, and AI from a single control plane for the Microsoft databases portfolio.

Database Hub is available today in early access. Sign up today and see how the Database Hub can bring clarity and control to your database estate.

Moving forward with the SQL community
SQLCon is about bringing the SQL community together. It is about rebuilding connections and shared learning. It also reflects our long-term commitment to SQL. With a comprehensive portfolio built on strategic common foundations and available across edge, PaaS, and SaaS, Microsoft databases provide a unified platform for modern enterprise needs, whether you are migrating and modernizing, building cloud-native AI applications, or unifying your data. We are investing in SQL for the future, alongside the community that continues to shape it.

Finally, SQLCon is coming to Europe! Join the global data and SQL community from 28 Sep – 01st October, 2026 in Barcelona, Spain for hands-on learning, expert insights, and real-world stories. Register to be a part of it. I can’t wait to see you there.

Additional SQL resources
Get early access to Database Hub in Fabric
Microsoft Azure Summit: Migrate and Modernize with Agentic AI
What is new about SQL database in Fabric
Learn more about savings plan for databases
1Customers may see savings estimated to be between 0% and 35%. The 35% savings estimate is based on one Azure SQL Database serverless running for 12 months at a pay-as-you-go rate vs. a reduced rate for a 1-year savings plan. Based on Azure pricing as of March 2026. Prices are subject to change. Actual savings may vary based on location, database service, and/or usage.

The post Advancing agentic AI with Microsoft databases across a unified data estate 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.

For nearly a decade, Microsoft and Databricks have closely partnered with the goal of empowering organizations to unlock the value of their data. Together, we’ve delivered solutions that combine the flexibility of the lakehouse architecture with the scale and security of Azure. Today, we’re taking that collaboration even further by deepening integration between Azure Databricks and Microsoft OneLake.

Delivering on the promise of an open data lakehouse

The current pace of technological innovation requires data estates to be more flexible than ever before. Seamless interoperability between platforms is no longer an ideal goal but a technical imperative. Organizations need the freedom to choose the right tools for their data project without worrying about data silos or complex integrations. That’s why Databricks pioneered the open lakehouse architecture, and why Microsoft built OneLake—an open data lake designed to serve as the foundation for data and AI.

Together, we’re making this vision real:

• Mirroring data into OneLake – already generally available
  Earlier this year we released Azure Databricks mirroring. Customers can already mirror Databricks data into OneLake through Unity Catalog. ensuring that all data—including the highest performance tables managed by Azure Databricks—are instantly available across Microsoft Fabric workloads. Both platforms can work over the same copy of data stored in Delta Lake format with no data movement.
• Reading data from OneLake – coming by year-end
  While Databricks managed data is available in OneLake, reading OneLake data from Databricks will soon be enabled with the recent OneLake catalog API. By the end of 2025, Azure Databricks will enable native reading from OneLake through Unity Catalog in preview, allowing users to seamlessly access data stored in OneLake without duplication or complex pipelines. Data can come from any Fabric workload. This means faster analytics and lower costs.

Writing and storing data natively in OneLake – on the horizon

Looking ahead, Azure Databricks will support writing and storing data directly in OneLake, without any additional storage resources to manage. This will deliver additional simplicity and interoperability for customers building on the lakehouse architecture. We’ll share timelines for this capability at FabCon in March 2026.

Why this matters for customers

These new integrations go beyond technical progress—they underscore our shared commitment to openness, flexibility, and empowering customers with choice. Together, Microsoft and Databricks are helping organizations unlock more value from their data with a seamless, unified foundation across both platforms.

With these integrations, customers can:

• Choose the right engine and tool for the job at hand: Gain full flexibility to pick the engine, tool, or platform you want for every task—based on your goals, workloads, or team expertise—without compromise.
• Bring data directly into your productivity apps: The OneLake catalog is now woven into Microsoft 365 experiences such as Teams, Excel, and Copilot Studio. This means business users can easily discover, access, and apply insights right where they work. For example, Teams users can enrich chats, channels, and meetings with data-driven context, with any data governed by OneLake or Unity Catalog.
• Scale resources efficiently and focus on innovation: With a single, shared copy of data across Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks, you can eliminate costly duplication, streamline governance, and redirect time and investment toward innovation instead of data movement.
• Deliver richer AI and analytics outcomes: Whether you’re building copilots in Microsoft Copilot Studio and AI Foundry, building Agents in Azure Databricks, or visualizing data in Power BI, you can unify and integrate data across Azure Databricks and Microsoft solutions—without ever moving it. Likewise, data in OneLake can seamlessly flow into Azure Databricks to power advanced AI, analytics, and data-sharing scenarios.

A shared commitment to innovation

Our collaboration is built on trust and a shared belief that openness drives innovation. By bringing Azure Databricks and OneLake closer together, we’re giving customers the freedom to build modern data architectures without compromise.

We’re excited about what’s next—and we’re just getting started.

The post Microsoft and Databricks: Advancing Openness and Interoperability with OneLake appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

This year’s agenda is packed with sessions tailored to every stage of your Fabric journey. Explore key sessions across Power BI, AI, databases, security and governance, and Microsoft OneLake, and get a first look at the newest features and what’s coming next on the roadmap. Whether you’re looking to sharpen your skills, dive into data stewardship best practices, or get started with Microsoft Copilot in Fabric, you’ll find sessions designed to meet you where you are and help you go further.

To make the most of your time at FabCon Vienna, look through our list of sessions you won’t want to miss. We also highly recommend attending core notes from the teams building Microsoft Fabric. These sessions offer strategic insights into what’s new, what’s coming, and how to maximize your experience at the event.

Fabric core note sessions

• The roadmap for Microsoft SQL, ground to cloud to Fabric
• Fabric Data Factory: What’s new and roadmap
• Fabric Data Warehouse: What’s new, what’s next
• Power BI roadmap: Strategy, vision, and demos
• Unify your data estate with OneLake, the OneDrive for data
• The road ahead for AI in Fabric: Data agents and intelligent solutions
• Taking AI-powered action at the speed of business with Real-Time Intelligence
• What’s next for Fabric Data Engineering: Roadmap and innovations
• Fabric security: Everything you need to know!

Power BI

Chat with your data through AI-powered search and analytics

Session speakers: Lada Hill and Eun Hee Kim

Discover how Microsoft Fabric Copilot is changing the way users explore data in Power BI. This session dives into the Chat with your Data experience, showing how to ask smarter questions, uncover insights faster, and get more value from your reports. Hear from the Power BI product team on how to optimize your prompts and make the most of Copilot’s capabilities. Plus, get a sneak peek at upcoming features that will take AI-powered analytics even further.

Power BI DataViz World Championship – European Edition

Join us for a high-energy, live competition where four standout data creators go head-to-head in a timed Power BI visualization challenge. Using the same dataset, each competitor will build compelling reports that showcase creativity, storytelling, and technical skill. A panel of celebrity judges will evaluate the results and crown the FabCon Viz Champion, with the winner’s work featured across the community. Whether you’re a Power BI pro or just love great data stories, this is your front-row seat to inspiration, innovation, and a little friendly competition.

The latest in AI

Fabric and Azure AI Foundry playing nicely together

Session speaker: Grímur Sæmundsson

Explore how Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI Foundry work together to streamline employee assessments in the public sector. This session walks through a real-world solution in which Fabric handles data processing and Azure OpenAI enhances analysis and feedback generation. Learn how retrieval-augmented generation is used to embed guidelines, and see Notebooks, Semantic Link, and PySpark in action to retrieve and prepare data. You’ll walk away with practical insights into using LLMs and Fabric to automate complex evaluation workflows.

Databases

SQL Server 2025: The AI-ready enterprise Database Connected with Microsoft Fabric

Session speakers: Bob Ward and Uros Milanovic

Discover what’s new in SQL Server 2025—now with built-in AI, enhanced performance, and deep integration with Azure and Microsoft Fabric. Learn how SQL enables AI applications both on-premises and in the cloud, with consistent capabilities from ground to cloud to Fabric. This session covers key features designed for modern database developers, making it easier than ever to build intelligent, connected apps.

Real-Time Intelligence

Unlock the power of Digital Twin solutions with Real-Time Intelligence

Session speakers: Chafia Aouissi and Jomit Vaghela

Explore how Microsoft Fabric’s Digital Twin Builder helps you design AI-ready digital twin solutions using real-time data, ontology management, and contextualization. Learn how to map, model, and analyze real-world systems for deeper insights, predictive maintenance, and smarter decision-making. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to scale, this session offers practical guidance on building and optimizing digital twins with Fabric Real-Time Intelligence.

Data warehouse and data engineering

Accelerating Fabric Migration: New Assistant Tools for Data Engineering and Warehousing

Session speakers: Jenny Jiang and Ancy Philip

Learn how Microsoft’s new migration assistants simplify moving from Synapse to Microsoft Fabric. This session covers tools for Spark and Data Warehouse migrations, highlighting key features, feature parity, and differences to guide your strategy. See live demos, explore upcoming capabilities, and leave with practical tips to ensure a smooth and efficient migration to Fabric.

Mastering Microsoft Fabric Data Warehousing: Tips & Tricks You Need to Know

Session speaker: Kristyna Ferris

Learn practical tips to optimize performance and manage your Microsoft Fabric data warehouse more effectively. This session covers creating case-insensitive warehouses, monitoring and tuning query performance, and stopping rogue queries that threaten capacity. Packed with real-world examples and actionable guidance, you’ll leave with strategies you can apply immediately to keep your data warehouse stable and efficient.

Revolutionizing external data access in Fabric Data Warehouse

Session speakers: Jovan Popovic and Twinkle Cyril

Discover how Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse transforms external data access with new capabilities for reading and integrating data without ingestion. Learn to use external tables and OPENROWSET to query Delta Lake, parquet, and CSV files directly from OneLake, Lakehouse, and real-time analytics sources. This session highlights key enhancements to external tables, COPY INTO, and virtualization techniques—showcasing how Fabric unifies warehouse and lakehouse concepts into an open, modern platform.

Workspace strategy for Data Engineering in Microsoft Fabric

Session speaker: Ásgeir Gunnarsson

Choosing the right workspace strategy is critical to building scalable data engineering solutions in Microsoft Fabric. This session examines different approaches—single workspace, per stage, or per workload—and how factors like team size, DevOps practices, and security requirements influence your decision. Using the Medallion architecture as a guide, we’ll explore common challenges, practical workarounds, and key considerations to help you start strong and avoid a costly rework later.

Security and governance

Govern, manage, and protect your data in Microsoft Fabric

Session speakers: Yaron Canari and Adi Regev

Learn how Microsoft Fabric helps organizations govern, manage, and protect their analytics data with built-in compliance and security features. This session covers local governance tools within Fabric and how they integrate with Microsoft Purview for broader, enterprise-wide control. Gain practical insights into securing your data estate while staying compliant and in control.

Fabric security: Everything you need to know!

Session speakers: Kasper de Jonge and Anton Fritz

Microsoft Fabric offers a SaaS-first approach to data that includes powerful security features out of the box—but do you know what you’re getting? This session explores how Fabric handles authentication, inbound access, data storage, and user-level permissions. Learn how to secure your data estate, control access, and integrate governance with Microsoft Purview. Walk away ready to engage your security team with confidence.

Microsoft OneLake

Deep dive into Delta (Parquet) and OneLake: Unpacking the storage behind Microsoft Fabric

Session speaker: Steve Campbell

Explore the core storage technologies that power Microsoft Fabric—OneLake, Delta, and Parquet—and learn how they work together to enable scalable, lake-centric analytics. This session breaks down Delta’s key features like ACID transactions, schema evolution, and time travel, without diving into heavy code or jargon. With real-world examples and visual aids, you’ll gain the foundational knowledge to make smart architectural decisions and optimize storage performance in your Fabric solutions. Perfect for data engineers, analysts, and IT pros familiar with Fabric but new to its storage underpinnings.

Additional can’t miss sessions

Git good: Best practices for CI/CD and collaboration in Microsoft Fabric

Session speaker: Peer Grønnerup

Take your Fabric projects to the next level with practical strategies for CI/CD, Git integration, and team collaboration. Learn how to structure repos, automate deployments with Fabric CLI and fabric-cicd, and build pipelines using Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions. Peer, a Fabric expert with over 15 years of experience in data and BI, will share real-world tips, branching strategies, and ready-to-use templates to help you scale workflows and maintain quality.

We’re at capacity—now what?

Session speaker: Frederik Declerck

Fabric capacities simplify data operations and cost control—but hitting limits can still catch teams off guard. In this session, we’ll demystify bursting, smoothing, and how background activity can unexpectedly max out your capacity. Learn how to diagnose issues using tools like the Capacity Metrics app and Monitoring Hub, and explore real-world strategies for short and long-term capacity management. We’ll also cover workload optimization, capacity planning, and new features like Autoscale Billing and surge protection to help you stay ahead of demand.

Explore more sessions and save your spot at FabCon Vienna

If you’re looking to see even more sessions and explore the full program, check out the complete schedule. You’ll find deep dives, hands-on workshops, and keynotes covering every corner of Microsoft Fabric and the future of AI-powered analytics.

A reminder that the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2025 is an in-person only event. Don’t miss the opportunity to learn about Fabric and see firsthand how Microsoft can help your organization prepare for the era of AI. Sign up for the FabCon Vienna conference using the code MSCUST to save €200 off your registration. We’ll see you in Vienna!

The post Sessions you won’t want to miss at FabCon Vienna 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.

Register here

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 for the FabCon conference 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.

Businesses face the challenge of deploying next-generation applications across hybrid data estates with an ever-growing volume of data spread across diverse environments including from on-premises operational systems, software as a service (SaaS) applications running in multiple public clouds, events from edge devices, objects in file storage, messaging queues, and beyond. As companies increasingly rely on AI and real-time analytics to drive innovation, the ability to seamlessly integrate, process, and analyze this data with low latency has become more critical than ever. The need for a modernized data infrastructure that can support massive data volumes and deliver intelligent, actionable insights at the speed of business is essential.

Striim and Microsoft—Partnering for success with Open Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric

To meet the growing demands of modern data infrastructure, Striim has deepened its longstanding collaboration with Microsoft to offer a new mirroring solution based on Open Mirroring that avoids complex Extraction Transformation Loading (ETL) to transform how businesses manage, integrate, and analyze their data. At the heart of this collaboration is Microsoft Fabric, which is a comprehensive, unified data platform supporting an open format data that combines everything from data integration, analytics, real-time intelligence, business intelligence, and now operational databases. All of these services are supported by Microsoft OneLake, a unified intelligent storage layer that addresses the challenges of decentralized data teams working in silos.

With its fully managed service built on Microsoft Azure, Striim enables businesses to continuously deliver fresh, real-time transactional data into Fabric for seamless, low-latency analytics and AI. As a key data integration partner for Microsoft Fabric, Striim plays a critical role in bridging the gap between siloed data environments, ensuring businesses can harness the full potential of their data with speed and precision.

Mirroring operational SQL data with SQL2Fabric-Mirroring

SQL2Fabric-Mirroring is a new managed mirroring service now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, developed in collaboration with Microsoft Fabric product teams. This streamlined, automated solution offers a cost-effective, low-latency approach to unifying data from diverse systems into a single analytics platform. Powered by Striim’s real-time data streaming capabilities, SQL2Fabric enables on-premises SQL databases to continuously replicate transactional data directly into Fabric OneLake, ensuring that data is fresh, consistent, and ready for analytics, AI, and decision-making.

Mirroring delivers the operational data into an open, analytics-ready Delta Lake table format. SQL2Fabric Mirroring provides flexibility and scalability, enabling businesses to replicate data seamlessly from multiple sources, without being locked into proprietary formats.

SQL2Fabric Mirroring solution highlights

• On-premises support: Easily replicate on-premises SQL Server transactional data (versions 2012 and up) into Microsoft Fabric.
• Low-latency analytics and AI: Striim’s platform is simple and user-friendly, designed for real-time analytics and AI workloads with minimal delays.
• Automated data and metadata synchronization: Streamline initial snapshot load, ongoing synchronization, and automated schema creation and evolution.
• High log throughput: Efficiently handle large datasets with high-speed log reading interfaces and fast snapshot loads.
• Data transformation and intelligence: Perform inline data enrichment, transformations, vector embedding detection, and protect sensitive data using language models like OpenAI (available in Striim Cloud Enterprise).
• Azure Marketplace availability: Enjoy a free 30-day trial and access the monthly managed service with built-in security, compliance, and data protection for mirroring data from on-premises SQL Server to a mirrored database in Fabric OneLake.

In addition to the SQL2Fabric-Mirroring solution, Striim Cloud Enterprise Solution also extends the mirroring capability to other sources such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and additional databases, NoSQL, and messaging and storage systems. 

Unlock real-time data and AI with Striim and Microsoft Fabric

Striim and Microsoft Fabric provide a powerful solution for real-time data integration, enabling organizations to continuously capture and consolidate data across systems with sub-second latency. Striim’s scalable streaming service transfers data into Microsoft Fabric, where it is centralized in OneLake, a unified multicloud data lake. Striim’s distributed architecture supports vertical and horizontal scaling, leveraging multithreading and parallel pipelines to process large-scale data efficiently. This ensures the solution can adapt to increasing workloads while maintaining low latency. Organizations gain immediate access to up-to-date data for analytics and AI applications, streamlining migration and improving decision-making with real-time insights.

Striim enhances Microsoft Fabric by supporting Change Data Capture (CDC) from popular sources like SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB, and Stripe, ensuring continuous data availability. This integration provides a seamless flow of data into Fabric, where its Real-Time Intelligence and Real-Time Hub tools facilitate rapid data ingestion, transformation, and analysis, empowering businesses to leverage real-time AI insights for smarter decisions.

By centralizing data in OneLake, organizations gain a unified platform for AI-powered strategies, boosting operational efficiency and accelerating time-to-market. With tools like Microsoft Copilot and the Workload Development Kit, users can quickly build machine learning models, generate code, and gain actionable insights, helping businesses stay competitive in a fast-evolving, data-driven world.

Modernize your data strategy today

Ready to unlock the full potential of your data and modernize your operations? Discover how Striim and Microsoft Fabric can streamline your data processes, accelerate AI adoption, and enhance decision-making. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your organization transform its data strategy with real-time analytics and AI.

To get started today, visit the SQL2Fabric-Mirroring page on the Azure Marketplace.

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The post Mirroring operational data for the AI era with Striim and Microsoft Fabric appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

The upcoming European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024 in Stockholm, Sweden is not just an event—it’s a beacon for Microsoft partners who are steering the future of AI and analytics. The conference, set to take place from September 24 to 27, 2024, is a pivotal gathering for those at the forefront of deploying and adopting Microsoft Fabric’s transformative technologies.  

Stockholm, the heart of Scandinavian innovation, is the perfect backdrop for the Fabric Community Conference. Known for its vibrant tech scene and forward-thinking approach, Stockholm embodies the spirit of progress that Microsoft and its partners strive for. 

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What to expect at the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024

Expect to be wowed. You’ll hear from leading Microsoft and community experts from around the world covering topics ranging from Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pattern applications and semantic modeling, to data governance and sustainability, to integrating applications into the Fabric framework. And if that isn’t enough, you’ll get to experience the latest features from Fabric, Power BI, Azure Databases, Azure AI, Microsoft Purview, and more, demonstrating how Fabric serves as a unified platform that empowers both data and business professionals across all industries.   

And as a prelude to the main conference, we invite you to a special Partner Pre-Day—day dedicated to you, our partners, to ensure you’re equipped with the knowledge and connections to thrive. See more details below.

We’ve also planned a few other activities to connect with the community: 

• Partner happy hour: Network with the Fabric leadership and product team. An invaluable opportunity to connect with the team bringing you Fabric.
• One-on-one partner executive connections: Meet with our executives and Fabric partner team to discuss your priorities and needs and gain a better understanding of partner motions and resources.
• Partner-to-partner connection: Connect with other partners to discuss joint business opportunities and share learnings. 

What’s in it for Microsoft partners 

For Microsoft partners, the conference is more than just a learning experience; it represents an amazing chance for partners to forge deeper connections with the minds behind the technology, to engage with customers eager to leverage your expertise to grow their business, and to network with peers and other partners who are equally passionate about driving adoption of these amazing technologies. Are you excited yet? 

And of course, let’s not forget the Partner Pre-Day, an invaluable opportunity for partners to delve into the latest Microsoft partner initiatives, resources, and strategies for focusing on how Microsoft Fabric drives business growth and innovation. 

Here’s a sneak peek into the Partner Pre-Day: 

• Get inspired: Attend Ask Me Anything sessions with top Microsoft data, AI, and analytics leadership and this year’s Partner of the Year Award winners.
• Learn: Gain insights on how best to take advantage of partner-only offerings and incentives, access to resources, and deep technical skilling customized for our Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program ecosystem.
• Share: Meet one-on-one with Microsoft executives and the Microsoft partner team to share what’s on your mind.
• Connect: Forge new relationships and strengthen existing ones with your partner peers for joint business outcomes.  

If you’re as excited about the Fabric Conference in Stockholm as we are, you’ll want to stay connected for all the latest updates. Be sure to follow the event on Microsoft’s partner social media channels on LinkedIn, Fabric YouTube, and the Fabric Tech Community Blog. These platforms are your go-to for live updates, exclusive behind-the-scenes content, and a chance to network with fellow innovators before, during, and after the conference. 

And hey, while you’re at it, why not join the Fabric Partner Community? It’s a fantastic way to get involved with weekly engineering calls where you can dive deep into the tech, ask questions, and share your insights. It’s like having a backstage pass to the world of Microsoft Fabric.

Now let’s make some noise—take these next steps

• Register for the Fabric Conference today. By registering early for the 3-day pass, you can take advantage of an exclusive €200 off discount using the code MSCUST.
• Check out sponsorship opportunities.
• And of course, share this blog post with your network to start those pre-conference discussions online.

Start your Fabric journey today

Check out these additional resources to learn more about Fabric and prepare your organization for the next phase of your Fabric journey. 

• Read this blog to learn how to enable your organization to help customers prepare their data for AI innovation with Microsoft Fabric.
• Check out the new Fabric certification and Fabric Career Hub to get your team upskilled and let customers know you’re Fabric certified.
• Join the Fabric Partner Community on Microsoft Teams, where you can attend the Fabric Engineering Connection (our weekly partner community calls with product engineering), stay connected with other partners, and learn of the latest resources, opportunities, and more.
• Visit Azure Migrate and Modernize and Azure Innovate to learn more about Azure Innovate, our hero partner offering, and to access resources and funding for customer projects. 

Let’s get the buzz going and show the world what the Microsoft partner community is all about. 

I can’t wait to see you all in Stockholm, Sweden for an unforgettable experience. Let’s innovate, collaborate, and grow together!

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In partnership with Microsoft, the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference is brought to you by the team behind ESPC, Europe’s premier Microsoft 365 Conference and the European Power Platform Conference. 

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Microsoft is excited to announce an expanded partnership with Snowflake, marking a significant step forward in our commitment to providing customers with a seamless data experience. This will enable bi-directional data access between Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric, ensuring more efficient and flexible data management. 

With the launch of Fabric, we introduced OneLake—a single, unified, software as a service (SaaS) open data foundation, establishing our commitment to open standards. We are now taking our commitment to open standards further by including support for Iceberg, in addition to Delta Lake in Microsoft Fabric OneLake. This means that applications that support Iceberg (including Snowflake) or Delta Lake can interoperate with Fabric. This empowers our customers with diverse environments to work across applications and platforms, with OneLake providing an open data lake foundation for unifying their data estate.

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What are we announcing? 

Microsoft and Snowflake are working to enable the following capabilities, which will light up over the coming months: 

• OneLake will support Iceberg, alongside Delta Lake. This will be done using the Apache XTable project that both Microsoft and Snowflake are committed to. 
• Snowflake will be able to store data in Iceberg format in OneLake. 
• Data written by either platform, Snowflake or Fabric, will be available in both Iceberg and Delta Lake formats through XTable translation in OneLake. 
• Snowflake will be able to read any Fabric data artifact in OneLake, stored physically or virtually through shortcuts. 
• Snowflake data items will light up experiences in any of the Fabric engines as well as Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure AI Studio, and Copilot for Microsoft 365. 

What does it mean for you? 

With this integration, you will be able to work with a single copy of your data across Snowflake and Fabric, regardless of whether the data is stored using Delta Lake or Iceberg format. This enables a number of compelling scenarios: 

• Bi-directional data access across Fabric and Snowflake ensures that data can be analyzed across any of the engines in Fabric, or in Snowflake, depending on the customer’s needs.  
• You will also be able to access your data through your favorite apps such as Microsoft 365, Copilot for Microsoft 365, and Studio. 
• With OneLake data accessible in both Snowflake and Fabric, you can reduce the time spent integrating applications and organizing your data estate, reduce the costs of duplicating data across various locations, and dedicate more time to discovering insights. 

“We’ve heard from many of our mutual customers that they want increased interoperability across Snowflake and Fabric in a seamless, cost-efficient manner. As both Snowflake and Microsoft are firm believers in open standards, we see our joint support for Apache Iceberg as an opportunity to offer customers choice when it comes to how and where they interact with their data.” 

—Christian Kleinerman, Executive Vice President of Product at Snowflake  

Unify your data estate 

The rationale behind this expanded partnership is clear: to give our customers an edge in harnessing their digital investments by helping them simplify and unify their data estate with OneLake in Fabric. By combining the strengths of Microsoft Fabric and Snowflake, two leading data platforms, we are further expanding our commitment to open standards, and empowering our customers to do more with their data with the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform. 

Learn the latest about Fabric in our blog “Unlock real-time insights with AI-powered analytics in Microsoft Fabric.”

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