FabConEurope25 was terrific in Vienna last week. Great opportunity to meet Fabric and data experts, speak to the product teams and experts, and the presentations were fantastic. The hardest part was deciding which session to attend as there are so many competing at the same time.
My big takeaways:
- Fabric SQL is excellent. The HA, managed service, redundancy, and shipping logs ensure that OneLake is in near real-time. Fabric SQL supports new native geospatial types. SQL has temporal tables (old news), but row, column and object-level (incl. table) security is part of OneLake. There are a couple of things security reviewers will query, but they are addressed.
- Fabric Data Agent is interesting. Connect to your SQL relational data and work with it.
- User-defined functions (UDF), including Translytical (write-back), HTTP in or out, wrap stored procedures, notebooks,.... - amazing.
- OneLake security is complex but can be understood, especially with containers/layers, such as Tenant, Workspace, Item, and Data. There is more needed, but it's miles ahead of anything else, and Graph is the magic, so it will only continue to improve. - amazing, but understand security. Embrace Entra and OAuth; use keys only as a last resort.
- Snowflake is our friend. Parquet is fantastic, and Snowflake, including Iceberg, play well together with MS Fabric. There are new versions of Delta Parquet on the way (and this will even make Fabric stronger, supporting both existing and the latest formats).
- Mirroring and shortcuts - don't ETL unless you need to shortcut, then mirror, then ETL.
- Use workspaces to build out simple medallion architectures.
- AI Search/Vector Search and SQL are crazy powerful.
- New Map functionality has arrived and is arriving on Fabric. Org Apps for Maps is going to be helpful in the map space. pmtiles are native... (if you know you know)
- Dataverse is great with Fabric and shortcuts, as I learned from Scott Sewell at an earlier conference. Onelake coupled with Dataverse, is massively underutilised by most orgs,
- Power BI also features new Mapping and reporting capabilities related to geospatial data.
- Other storage: CosmosDB (it has its place, but suddenly, with shortcuts, the biggest issue of cost can be massively reduced with the right design decisions). Postgres is becoming a 1st class citizen, which is excellent on multiple levels. The CDC stuff is fantastic already.
- RTI on Fabric is going to revolutionise Open Telemetry and AI, networking through the OSI model, application testing, digital twins, and live monitoring,.... I already knew this, but it keeps getting better. EventHub and notebooks are my new best friends. IoT is the future; we all knew this, but now with Fabric, it will be much easier to implement safely and get early value.
- Direct Lake is a game changer for Power BI - not new, but it just keeps getting better and better thanks to MS Graph.
- Manage Private Endpoint as improved and should be part of all companies' governance.
- Purview... It's excellent and solves/simplifies DLP, governance and permissions. I'm out of my depth on Fabric Purview and governance, and I know way more than most people on DLP and governance. Hire one of those key folks from Microsoft here.
- Warehouse lineage of data is so helpful.
- We need to understand Fabric Digital Twins, as it is likely to be a competitor or a solution we offer and integrate.
- Parquet is brilliant and fundamentally is why AI is so successful.
- Powerful stuff in RDF for modelling domains - this is going to be a business in itself. I'm clueless here, but I won't be in a few weeks.
Now the arr..
- Pricing and capacity are not transparent. Watch out for the unexpected monster bill! Saying that the monitoring and controls are in place, but switching off my tenant doesn't sit well with me if workloads aren't correctly set out. Resource governance at the workspace level will help fix the situation or design around it, but it will be more expensive.
- Workspace resource reservation does not exist yet; however, it can be managed using multiple fabric tenants. Distribution will be significantly improved for cost control with Workspace resource management.
- Licensing needs proper thought for an enterprise, including ours. Reserve Fabric is 40% cheaper, and it cannot be suspended, so use the reserved fabric just as you would for most Azure Services. Good design results in much lower cost with Workloads. Once again, those who genuinely understand know my pain with the workload costs.
- Vendors and partners are too far behind (probably due to the pace of innovation)
Microsoft Fabric is brilliant; it is all under one simple managed autoscaling umbrella. It integrates and plays nicely with other solutions, has excellent access to Microsoft storage, and is compatible with most of the others. Many companies will move onto Fabric or increase their usage in the short term, as it is clearly the leader in multiple Gartner segments, all under one hood. AI will continue to help drive its adoption by enterprises.
