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.

Consider this: over 97% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Microsoft Power BI and many of these organizations seek to enhance Power BI’s capabilities by extending it for planning and Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. However, traditional approaches to planning and reporting exacerbate silos: 

1. Historical insights feeding future plans: Organizations rely on historical performance data to inform future plans. This process requires transferring actual transactional data into separate planning systems, adding time and complexity. 

2. From planning back to reporting: Once budgets and forecasts are finalized, they must be reloaded into Power BI for variance analysis and performance reporting—a tedious and redundant process. 

Planning is rarely a one-time exercise. It evolves through multiple iterations, scenarios, and assumptions, requiring inputs from diverse teams, departments, and geographies. This fragmented approach necessitates back-and-forth data orchestration, creating inefficiencies and compounding the issue of data silos. 

Craig Schiff, Founder and CEO of BPM Partners, summarized it perfectly: “Planning solutions fully integrated with existing BI software is an underserved area that is growing in importance.” 

Microsoft’s vision for planning 

At Microsoft, our vision is clear: eliminate silos and empower organizations to plan and report seamlessly within a unified platform—Microsoft Fabric. 

With Fabric, enterprises no longer need to replicate data into separate software as a service (SaaS) or legacy planning systems. Instead, users can build plans and forecasts directly on top of the semantic models in Power BI, ensuring immediate availability for reporting and analysis across Fabric. 

Microsoft Fabric and Lumel: partnering for success 

We are excited to announce a deep collaboration with Lumel that brings Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) for planning applications to Power BI and Microsoft Fabric. 

Lumel’s no-code, self-service EPM solution enables business users to create sophisticated planning and reporting applications within Power BI, tightly integrated with Fabric. This approach delivers: 

• Seamless integration: Build and modify plans directly in Power BI, leveraging Fabric semantic models. 

• Collaborative capabilities: Commenting, notifications, scheduling, and approval workflows streamline team collaboration. 

• Broader use cases: Support for transactional and analytical scenarios expands Fabric’s utility for modern HTAP workloads and planning use cases. 

Lumel’s solution redefines the boundaries of what organizations can achieve with Power BI and Fabric. For example, with Lumel’s Inforiver Write-Back Matrix for Planning, businesses can effortlessly create their 2025 plans, save them to OneLake, and integrate them instantly into reporting and analysis workflows. 

Our strong collaboration with Lumel reinforces Microsoft’s commitment to providing a single, unified platform where planning and analytics coexist, helping organizations make better, faster decisions. 

Looking ahead with Microsoft Fabric 

Take the next step towards connected planning—streamlining  workflows, eliminating silos, and unlocking new possibilities with Microsoft Fabric and Lumel. 

Lumel and Microsoft Fabric

Enterprise planning and performance management in Power BI and Fabric

Watch here

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to empower organizations with cutting-edge tools for the future of planning and analytics. 

The post Planning in Microsoft Fabric: A shared vision through collaboration with Lumel  appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

After February 1^st, 2025, customers with expiring Enterprise Agreements (EA) or Microsoft Cloud Agreements will no longer be able to add or purchase Power BI Premium capacity through their agreement. Existing Power BI Premium capacity customers should work with their Microsoft account representative to transition to a suitable Fabric capacity and pricing plan ahead of their next renewal, which provides more flexibility in SKU size, pay-as-you-go billing options, access to Azure-only features, and is eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). 

As you transition, you can select either pay-as-you-go pricing or reservation pricing. Reservation pricing for Fabric allows you to pre-commit Fabric Capacity Units in one-year increments, helping you save up to 40.5% over the Fabric pay-as-you-go prices. This reservation also provides more flexibility in SKU size, allowing the reservation discount to apply to other capacities within the same scope. Read our licensing documentation to learn more about how to purchase Fabric capacity reservations.

For more information on this announcement and the benefits of Fabric capacity (F-SKUs), please read the Important update coming to Power BI Premium licensing blog.

Microsoft Fabric

See how the role-specific workloads within Fabric can help everyone in your organization manage, interpret, and act on data and insights.

Try today

Migrating to Microsoft Fabric capacity 

As part of this retirement, you will need to migrate from your existing Power BI Premium capacity to a new Fabric capacity. After the end of your subscription, you will have 30 days of free Power BI Premium capacity; matching the amount of free capacity offered by your previously purchased P-SKU. This should reduce the need to pay for two capacities at the same time. In parallel, you also have 90 days to access your data in Power BI after the end of your subscription. Once you have migrated all of your data to your new Fabric capacities, you must delete your Power BI Premium capacities. The migration itself is simple—all you need to do is reassign your workspaces to the new Fabric capacity. However, many of you have tenants that span thousands or even hundreds of thousands of workspaces, making manual migration a challenge.

This blog will cover the different options you have when considering how you want to migrate your items between Power BI and Fabric capacities. First, we will cover how to migrate manually and then we’ll show how our new automated migration tool can help you accelerate the process. 

Manual migration 

You can reassign workspaces to the new Fabric capacity(s) individually from each workspace or by bulk assigning them in the admin portal.

Please note, that if your workspaces contain Fabric artifacts, they cannot be reassigned to capacities located in a different geography. If you have a small amount or no Fabric artifacts in your environment, you can disable Fabric features as you migrate your workspaces to accelerate the process. Learn how here.

Also note, that if you’ve created a large semantic model in a workspace, it must stay in that region. You cannot reassign a workspace with a large semantic model to a capacity in another region. 

If you want step-by-step instructions with screenshots on how to migrate, please download our migration guide.

Automated P-SKU to F-SKU migration tool 

Many customers have hundreds or thousands of workspaces in their Power BI Premium capacities. For these customers, we have created an automated migration tool that can help you programmatically migrate using Fabric REST APIs. This Fabric notebook will automatically create pay-as-you-go F SKUs for each capacity you select and make sure that F SKU is in the same region, has equivalent capacity, includes the same admins, and migrates all workspaces. You will have to manually transfer your capacity settings such as disaster recovery, notifications and any delegated tenant settings that have been overridden at the capacity level. These settings can be accessed via the Capacity Admin section of the Fabric Admin portal. And if you want a reserved instance, you will need to set that up yourself before using the tool. With that in mind, we recognize that you might be at different points of the journey and the notebook can help with several scenarios including:  

1. F-SKU creation: If your F-SKU has not yet been created, it will create the F SKU first and then complete the rest of the process. If you already have an F-SKU(s), it will skip the creation and complete the rest of the process. 

2. Migrating multiple capacities: You can migrate a single capacity, a list of capacities, or all of your capacities. 

3. Migrating trial capacities: You can migrate Fabric trial capacities to paid Fabric capacities. 

Check out the following demo to see how it works:

If you want to try out this tool for yourself, you can access the tool on the Semantic Link Labs GitHub here.

Semantic Link Labs also has other capabilities which can help you automate and simplify many technical processes in Fabric. These tools can help you with scenarios for migrating import and DirectQuery semantic models to Direct Lake, model best practice analyzer, Vertipaq Analyzer, and over 300 other functions. You can even create, update, suspend, or resume your Fabric capacities.  

Frequently asked questions 

Should I plan for downtime during the workspace migration process?

Yes, you should plan for migration to take place when users and jobs are not active to reduce potential failures. 

Will I have to migrate reports and data when I switch from P-SKUs to F-SKUs?

You will just have to reassign your workspaces to the new Fabric capacity. Read the step-by-step guidance above for more information.

What will happen to my Power BI and Fabric artifacts once I cancel my Power BI Premium capacity and purchase F-SKU capacity? 

You will be able to access your Fabric artifacts for 90 days after P-SKU capacity subscription has ended. During these 90 days, you can migrate your workspaces to your new F-SKU capacity without fear of losing access to your existing work. However, once the workspace is reassigned, all currently active jobs will be canceled. Rerun those jobs after migration. Migration doesn’t impact scheduled jobs.

Will I have to pay for both P-SKU and F-SKU as I transition? 

No. If a Premium subscription expires, you have 90 days to access your data. During this time, you will be able to migrate your workspaces to your new F-SKU capacity without losing access to your existing work. Once you’ve migrated your data, you should delete your Power BI Premium capacities that are no longer in use.

Does the Power BI Pro per user and Power BI Premium per user license requirement for Power BI Premium per capacity also extend to Fabric capacity? 

Power BI report authors and consumers of workspaces that are not in a Fabric capacity will still need a Power BI Pro Per User or their Power BI Premium Per User licenses. However, with an Fabric 64 SKU (F64)—a Premium P1 equivalent—or larger capacities, report viewers can view content with only a Microsoft Fabric free license if the content is hosted in the capacity. For non-Power BI activities, no Power BI Pro license is required. This means users can use pipelines, create data warehouses, use notebooks, and manage their capacities without a Power BI Pro license. 

Can I move a workspace from one capacity to a capacity in a different region? 

You won’t be able to move a Power BI workspace to a new region if it has Fabric items in it. E.g., Fabric Pipelines, Fabric Shortcuts, or Fabric ML, etc. If you move or delete these Fabric items first, you can then proceed with moving the workspace to another capacity in a different region. Additionally, if you have large data format enabled, you will need to convert those to small data format before transitioning to a new region. 

What are the benefits of Fabric capacity? 

Customers who migrate their Power BI Premium capacity subscription to Fabric capacity will enjoy a range of additional benefits. Fabric capacity is eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) which means Fabric customers can apply their Fabric spend against their MACC commitment. There is also a pay-as-you-go option for Fabric which enables you to dynamically scale up or scale down and pause capacity as needed. Fabric capacity customers can also take advantage of smaller compute SKUs that start far below the entry-level Power BI Premium SKU.

Additionally, Fabric capacity customers will get access to Azure-only features like trusted workspace access and Managed Private Endpoints for Spark. These features are native to Azure and not available to Power BI Premium capacity customers. See all Microsoft Fabric SKUs available in your Azure region on the Microsoft Fabric pricing page.

Can I turn off all of Microsoft Fabric or some of the Fabric workloads?

To disable Microsoft Fabric, you can turn off the Microsoft Fabric admin switch. After disabling Microsoft Fabric, users will have view-only permissions for Microsoft Fabric items. If you disable Microsoft Fabric for a specific capacity while Microsoft Fabric is available in your organization, your selection will only affect that capacity. 

If I have both Power BI Premium and Fabric capacity, how does that impact my experience?

If you have Power BI Premium capacity on your agreement, multiple capacities may be provisioned by different users within the same tenant including both P-SKUs and F-SKUs. This allows capacities to be purchased and managed separately by different business units, each powering their own projects and creators, thus allowing easy cost management and control. It also means, your experience won’t be impacted if you’ve purchased both F-SKUs and P-SKUs. Note, all agreements that expire after February 1^st, 2025 will no longer be able to purchase Power BI Premium capacity.

Once the Fabric capacity is activated, will the existing Power BI reports and dashboards run the same way as they did in the Power Premium capacity? 

Once the dashboards are in a workspace assigned to a Fabric capacity with equivalent capability to the Power BI Premium capacity they were in (e.g., P1 equivalent to an F64), they should behave the same way. If you have any specific concerns, you should confirm through testing.

The post Automate your migration to Microsoft Fabric capacities appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

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

Microsoft Fabric

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

Try Fabric today

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

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

—Mark Hourany, Director of People Analytics, Chalhoub Group

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

New capabilities coming to Microsoft Fabric

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI-powered development

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

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

Fabric platform

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

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

Security and governance

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

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

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

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

Workload enhancements and updates

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

Data Factory

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

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

Data Engineering

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

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

Data Warehouse

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

Real-Time Intelligence

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

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

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

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

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

Power BI

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI-powered data estate

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

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

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

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

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

AI-powered insights

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

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

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

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

Start building your Fabric skills

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

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

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

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

Join us at Microsoft Ignite

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

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric: 

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

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

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

Fabric bridges the gap between your data and your goals

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

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

Connect with the Fabric community at our European #FabCon

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

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

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

Join the Microsoft Fabric and AI Learning Hackathon

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

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

Fuel your imagination with endless possibilities:

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

Microsoft Fabric and AI Learning Hackathon

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

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

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

Streamline your Fabric skilling with our curated learning plan

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

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

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

Learn from our Fabric pros, then test your skills

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

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

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

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

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

There’s never been a better time to master Fabric

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

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

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. 

European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024

A brand-new conference dedicated to Fabric

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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. 

The post Empowering partnerships: The Microsoft Fabric Conference—your gateway to AI innovation appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

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

Get started with Microsoft Fabric

Set up Fabric for your business and discover resources that help you take the first steps

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

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

—Tammy Wigg, Chief Data Analytics Officer at Aurizon

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

Fabric is a complete data platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Jimmy Grewal, Managing Director of Elcome

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

Extend Fabric with your own, custom workloads and experiences

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

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

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

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

Orchestrate complex data workflows in the Fabric Data Factory workload

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

Fabric is lake-centric and open

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

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

Empower business users with Fabric

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

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

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

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

Fabric is AI-powered

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

Use Copilot in Fabric, now generally available 

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

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

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

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

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

New partnerships with Microsoft Fabric

Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric

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

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

Adobe and Microsoft Fabric 

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

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

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

Azure Databricks Unity Catalog integration with Fabric 

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

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

Federate OneLake as a Remote Catalog in Azure Databricks 

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

Watch these announcements in action at Microsoft Build 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join us at the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 

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

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Steven Easton, BI Channels Specialist at One NZ

Learn more about One NZ’s journey.

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Join the thriving Microsoft Fabric community

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

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

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

New capabilities coming to Microsoft Fabric

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

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

Fabric is a complete platform

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

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

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

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

Security in Microsoft Fabric

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

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

Governing data in Microsoft Fabric

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

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

Fabric is lake-centric and open

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

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

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

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

Fabric can empower every business user

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

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

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

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

Fabric is AI-powered

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

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

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

Join us at Microsoft Build

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

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

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

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

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

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

After January 1, 2025, existing Power BI Premium per capacity customers should work with their Microsoft account representative to transition to a suitable Fabric SKU and pricing plan at the time of their next renewal, which provides more flexibility in SKU size, pay-as-you-go billing options, and is eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC).

Microsoft Fabric pricing

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Retiring Power BI Premium per capacity SKUs 

Last year, we introduced Microsoft Fabric—combining the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory to create a single, unified software as a service (SaaS) platform. Microsoft Fabric is a superset of Power BI Premium; meaning it has all the capabilities of Power BI Premium plus six other core workloads. To make the transition as easy as possible, we have ensured customers can access Fabric capabilities on their existing Power BI Premium per capacity SKUs (P-SKUs). 

However, with both pay-as-you-go and reservation SKUs now available for Microsoft Fabric, we are announcing the eventual end of life for the Power BI Premium P-SKUs. Depending on your existing agreement, the retirement will impact you differently:  

• New customers will not be able to purchase Power BI Premium P-SKUs after July 1, 2024.
• Existing customers without an Enterprise Agreement (EA) will be able to renew their Power BI Premium capacity until January 1, 2025. Customers who have a renewal date after January 1, 2025 will need to replace their P-SKU purchase with the purchase of an Fabric per capacity SKUs (F-SKUs) at the end of their agreement.
• Customers with an existing EA agreement can continue to renew their P-SKU purchase annually until the end of their EA agreement. If the end of the existing EA agreement is after January 1st, 2025, they will have to transition to an F-SKU once the agreement has ended to continue using Microsoft Fabric.
• Customers on a sovereign cloud will not be impacted by this retirement as they do not currently have access to Microsoft Fabric. We will provide additional information as soon as it’s available.  

All existing customers will be able to purchase more Power BI Premium capacity on their current agreement until its end date.

The benefits of the Microsoft Fabric SKU 

Customers that migrate their P-SKU purchase to F-SKU will enjoy a range of additional benefits. Fabric SKUs are eligible for MACC which means Fabric customers can apply their Fabric spend against their MACC commitment. There is also a pay-as-you-go option for Fabric which enables you to dynamically scale up or scale down and pause capacity as needed. F-SKU customers can also take advantage of smaller compute SKUs that start far below the entry level P-SKU. See all Microsoft Fabric SKUs available in your Azure region on the Microsoft Fabric pricing page.   

Migrating to a Microsoft Fabric SKU 

Migrating your Power BI artifacts is as easy as reassigning your workspaces to the new Fabric capacity. Administrators can even bulk assign workspaces to accelerate the process. You will be able to access your Power BI and Fabric artifacts for at least 90 days after P-SKU capacity subscription has ended. During these 90 days, you will be able to migrate workspaces to your new F-SKU capacity without fear of losing access to your existing work. Learn more about managing and reassigning your workspaces in the Microsoft Fabric documentation.  

Power BI Embedded and Power BI Report Server 

Microsoft Fabric SKUs are not compatible with Power BI Report Server. To continue accessing Power BI Report Server, you can instead acquire it through SQL Server Enterprise Edition with Software Assurance. This option is the most popular way of acquiring Power BI Report Server. See Microsoft Volume Licensing or talk with your Microsoft account representative for more details. 

Microsoft Fabric SKUs are compatible with Power BI Embedded and can be used to run all of your Power BI Embedded activities. Read the blog “Power BI Embedded with Microsoft Fabric” for more information. 

Next steps 

To learn more about this change and how to migrate your P-SKU purchases to F-SKU, view the Power BI Premium documentation. You can also view your Fabric capacity pricing options on the Microsoft Fabric pricing page.  

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