Announcements from FabCon 2025

The 2025 Fabric Community Conference started yesterday, coming with a number of announcements about new features and enhancements. I’ve gathered most of them for you below with links to more information, and have the official overview post for you here:

FabCon 2025: Fueling tomorrow’s AI with new agentic capabilities and security innovations in Fabric

Let me know if you have any questions!

Copilot and AI Capabilities are now accessible to all paid SKUs in Microsoft Fabric

We are excited to announce that we will be removing the SKU requirement to use Copilot and AI capabilities in Microsoft Fabric. This means that by the end of April, customers on F2 and above will have access to Copilot, Fabric data agents, and more. Whether you’re an analyst, a data scientist, or an executive, this change puts the power of advanced AI right at your fingertips—no extra steps, no additional barriers.

The next evolution of OneLake security (Preview)

We are thrilled to announce the next evolution of this security model— OneLake security. These new capabilities build on the existing model, by allowing granular security definitions like row and column level security to now be defined directly in OneLake alongside your data. With the granular security now stored in OneLake, Fabric engines like Spark, SQL Endpoint and Power BI in Direct Lake mode will automatically follow the same security rules rather than requiring additional rules in each individual engine.

Empowering agentic AI by integrating Fabric with Azure AI Foundry

By combining Fabric’s sophisticated data analysis over enterprise data with Azure AI Foundry’s cutting-edge GenAI technology, businesses can create custom conversational AI agents leveraging domain expertise. This seamless integration enables organizations to develop agents that are not only based on unstructured data in Azure AI Search or SharePoint but also integrate with structured and semantic data in Microsoft OneLake, thereby enhancing data-driven decision-making.

Migration Assistant for Fabric Data Warehouse (Preview)

We are excited to announce the preview of a migration experience built natively into Fabric to enable Azure Synapse Analytics (Data Warehouse) customers to transition seamlessly to Microsoft Fabric.

Fabric Data Factory: What’s New and Latest Roadmap

Fabric Data Factory enables every organization to tackle the complexities of ingesting data, applying data transformations, and orchestrating these different data-related activities, needed to support every organization’s data integration needs, and delivering modern data management architectures.

Thank you to all customers and partners who shared their ideas, and suggestions, as we work together on shaping the future of data integration in the era of AI. Amongst the many Ideas that have been submitted, we have worked on many of them and delivered many product improvements ant features based on these Ideas. We could not have done it without you!

Introducing Autoscale Billing for Spark in Microsoft Fabric

We are introducing Autoscale Billing for Spark in Microsoft Fabric, a new billing model designed to offer greater flexibility and cost efficiency for Spark workloads. With this model, when enabled, your Spark workloads will no longer directly consume the Fabric capacity this billing option is enabled on; instead, they will run alongside your existing capacity (F2 or higher) and be billed on a pay-as-you-go basis in a serverless fashion, similarly to how billing for Spark works in Azure Synapse.

This addition does not replace the existing Fabric capacity model but rather complements it, giving organizations more options and control over how they allocate compute resources for Spark workloads.

Enhancing AI productivity in Fabric notebooks with Copilot updates

We are thrilled to introduce a new version of Copilot for Data Engineering and Data Science, a next-generation AI-powered assistant designed to elevate your data analysis and coding experience. Continuing to listen to customer feedback and are introducing new features to improve productivity, Copilot arrives with expanded capabilities, improved workflows, and a deeper integration into your Fabric notebooks environment.

New innovations in Microsoft Purview for protected, AI-ready data

We are excited to announce new innovations that help security and data teams accelerate their organization’s AI transformation:

1. Enhancing Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (Purview DLP) support for lakehouse in Microsoft Fabric to help prevent sensitive data loss by restricting access.

2. Expanding Purview DLP policy support for additional Fabric items such as KQL databases and Mirrored databases to send users notification through policy tips when they are working with sensitive data.

3. Microsoft Purview integration with Copilot in Fabric, specifically for Power BI.

4. Data Observability within the Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog.

OneLake catalog and Get Data are integrated into Excel for Windows

This integration makes it simple to load your Fabric OneLake data into Excel leveraging a get data experience to easily access both recent or existing Fabric data.

AI Ready Apps: build RAG Data pipeline from Azure Blob Storage to SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric within minutes

This blog post will provide step-by-step instructions for creating a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline to prepare your data for AI integration using SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric.

Supporting Database Mirroring sources behind a firewall

Database Mirroring now supports firewall connectivity for Azure SQL Database, with Snowflake and Azure SQL Managed Instance coming soon, ensuring secure and efficient data movement. In this blog, we explore how to enable these connections using the On-Premises Data Gateway and the VNET Data Gateway.

Simplify Your Data Ingestion with Copy Job (Generally Available)

Copy Job is now generally available, bringing you a simpler, faster, and more intuitive way to move data! Whether you’re handling batch transfers or need the efficiency of incremental data movement, Copy Job gives you the flexibility and reliability to get the job done.

What’s new for SQL database in Fabric?

This week, at the 2025 Fabric Conference in Las Vegas, we are unveiling a series of features for the SQL database in Fabric, including: performance enhancements, streamlined developer workflows, and improved data pipeline management. Here are the high-level features you can look forward to!

Open Mirroring UI enhancements and CSV support to help you get started today

The release of support for CSV formats for Open Mirroring allows you to upload CSV files in addition to parquet files when you’re using the API or user experience.

Terraform Provider for Microsoft Fabric (Generally Available)

HashiCorp Terraform is an open-source tool widely used for creating and managing infrastructure across multiple cloud providers in a safe, predictable, and consistent manner.

Terraform Provider for Microsoft Fabric brings these powerful capabilities to the Microsoft Fabric ecosystem, enabling seamless management of your workspaces and resources through declarative configuration.

The significant advantage of Microsoft-developed Terraform provider for Fabric is the consistency and reliability it offers. You will benefit from tight integration, regular updates, and robust support.

The primary goal of Terraform Provider for Fabric is to automate the most complex aspects of deploying and managing Microsoft Fabric environments.

Simplify your Warehouse ALM with DacFx integration in Git and Deployment pipelines for Fabric Warehouse

Managing data warehouse changes and automating deployments is now simpler than ever with the integration of DacFx with Git and Deployment Pipelines for Fabric Warehouse. This integration enables seamless export and import of your data warehouses, efficient schema change management, and deployment through Git-connected workflows.