European Fabric Community Conference 2024 | All the Details

Microsoft has convened Europe’s first Microsoft Fabric Community Conference and the news they are sharing couldn’t be more interesting.

The event, which is taking place in Stockholm, Sweden, from September 24-27, is leaving us with 130 track sessions, 4 keynotes, workshops, exhibitions, community lounge, expert Q&A, DE&I program, and much more.

As we didn’t want to miss any detail, we have traveled to Stockholm and here we tell you the most important moments and releases.

European Fabric Community Conference 2024: Recap

The world’s leading experts in Microsoft Fabric gathered at this important meeting to share first-hand the latest capabilities being added to the Fabric platform.

The key updates are focused on ensuring that Fabric can deliver: development, a data and information estate, all powered by AI.

With Fabric, all data projects can be managed with role-specific tools for integration, warehousing, engineering, and data science, as well as real-time intelligence and business intelligence.

With integrated security and governance, you can protect data from any intrusions and ensure that only the right people have access to the right data.

In addition, with the addition of Copilot and other AI experiences, production time is accelerated. Here are just a few of the new enhancements and capabilities coming to Fabric.

Fabric Platform and DevOps

They are creating platform-wide capabilities that will help manage DevOps more seamlessly and address projects of any scale and complexity.

They are updating the user interface for deployment pipelines to be more focused, easier to navigate, and have a smoother flow.

Terraform

They have also teamed with Terraform to help customers ensure that deployment and administration tasks are executed accurately and consistently.

This vendor enables deployment and management processes to be automated and optimized using a declarative configuration language.

Integration with Git

The integration of Fabric with Git is now generally available, where you can integrate Fabric workspaces with Git repositories, taking advantage of version control and collaborating seamlessly with Azure DevOps or GitHub.

They have also extended the integration with Visual Studio Code, as you can 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 VS Code.

Security and governance

They are adding more granular data management capabilities, including item tagging and domain enhancements.

The ability to apply tags to Fabric elements helps users more easily find and use the right data. Once applied, data consumers can view, search, and filter by applied tags across multiple experiences.

They are also enhancing domains and subdomains with more controls for administrators, including the ability to define a default confidentiality tag, export settings, and sharing.

Deeper integration with Microsoft Purview

Security administrators will be able to use Microsoft Purview Information Protection confidentiality tags to manage who has access to Fabric items with certain tags, similar to Microsoft 365.

Purview’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy is also going to be extended, so security administrators can apply these policies to detect the upload of sensitive data to a Fabric server. If detected, the policy will trigger an automatic audit activity, alerting the security administrator and suggesting a custom policy.

Improvements in Data Factory

It simplifies the data ingestion experience with copy work, transforms dataflow capabilities, and launches enhancements to data pipelines.

It is also launching the Copilot experience in Fabric for Dataflows Gen2, allowing everyone to design data flows with the help of an AI-powered expert. And, finally, incremental refresh is being introduced in the preview, allowing updates to be limited to only new or updated data to reduce refresh times.

Data Engineering

They are upgrading the native execution engine for Fabric Spark and releasing the updated Fabric Runtime 1.3. This will improve the performance of Spark jobs by running queries directly on the storage core infrastructure, enabling up to four times faster performance compared to traditional.

They have also announced an extension of support in Spark for mirrored databases, providing a consistent and convenient way to seamlessly access and explore databases.

It allows you to easily aggregate data sources, exploit, perform transformations, and join data with other servers and mirrored databases.

Data Warehouse

Copilot in Fabric for Data Warehouse is now available in a preview version, which helps developers generate T-SQL queries for data analysis, explain and add comments to existing inline code, repair broken code, and answer questions about general data warehousing operations and tasks.

Real-Time Intelligence

New capabilities are being introduced in the Real-Time Intelligence feature, which will help better ingest, analyze, and visualize real-time data.

A new Real-Time Hub user experience is launched, a redesigned and enhanced experience with new left-hand navigation, a new page called “My Streams” for creating and accessing custom streams, and four new event streaming connectors: Azure SQL Managed Instance, SQL Server on Virtual Machine, Apache Kafka and Amazon MSK Kafka.

These new sources make it possible to create more complete and dynamic event streams.

Meanwhile, Copilot is being updated in Real-Time Intelligence, which translates natural language into KQL, helping to better understand and explore the data stored in Eventhouse.

Finally, the Data Activator experience is being updated to make it easier to define a variety of rules to act in response to changes in data over time. Alerts can be configured for all streaming data, visual elements, and real-time dashboards, as well as configuring alerts directly in KQL queries.

Power BI

New capabilities in Power BI will make it easier to track and use the KPIs that matter most, create organizational applications, and work with Direct Lake semantic models.

• Users will be enabled to promote consistent and reliable metrics across large organizations in Fabric, making it easier for end users to discover and use standardized metrics from corporate models. This will enable the development of standardized metrics that incorporate essential business logic.
• Organizational applications are being enhanced in Power BI, as it will now be possible to create multiple applications in each workspace, and contain other Fabric elements, such as notebooks and real-time dashboards.
• Ease of working with Direct Lake semantic models with a new version history, similar to the experience found in Microsoft 365 applications. You can now live edit these models directly from Power BI Desktop.
• General availability of OneLake for semantic models in import mode. This will automatically write imported data in your semantic models to Delta Lake tables in OneLake so you can enjoy the benefits of Fabric without any migration effort.

A more comprehensive Copilot experience is also added to help create reports in a clearer and more transparent way, which includes enhanced conversational capabilities, making it easier to provide more context. You will even be able to provide reporting schemas to improve transparency in the data fields being used.

OneLake

Fabric’s unified data lake will have more capabilities and enhancements to help better connect to and manage the data estate.

Shortcuts for Google Cloud Services (GCS) and S3-compatible sources are now generally available. These shortcuts also support the local data gateway, which you can use to connect to your local S3-enabled sources as well as GCS repositories that are protected by a virtual private cloud.

It will also feature tighter integration with Azure Databricks with the ability to access Databricks Unity catalog tables directly from OneLake.

In the coming weeks, Microsoft Fabric engines will be able to consume Iceberg data without movement or replication via OneLake shortcuts.

Finally, support for Snowflake database replication has been released for general use, providing a seamless, ETL-free experience for integrating existing Snowflake data with the rest of the data in Microsoft Fabric.

In a rapidly changing business environment, the ability to analyze data instantly has become a necessity, and thanks to it, companies gain the ability to monitor events in real-time.

This allows you to react quickly to changes and solve potential problems. And at Plain Concepts we help you to get the most out of it.

We offer you a Microsoft Fabric Adoption Framework with which we will evaluate the technological and business solutions, we will make a clear roadmap for the data strategy, we visualize the use cases that make the difference in your company, we take into account the sizing of equipment, time and costs, we study the compatibility with existing data platforms and we migrate Power BI, Synapse and Datawarehouse solutions to Fabric.