This was Fabcon 2025

At Fabcon Europe 2025, Microsoft unveiled a range of new features designed to significantly enhance the user experience for both technical and non-technical audiences.

In the overview below, we highlight the key improvements, explain which features make them possible and outline who will benefit most.

 

Unified & real-time data foundation

Organisations have long struggled with data silos—SAP in one corner, Oracle in another, and countless other systems scattered across the landscape. Traditionally, bringing this data together into a single view relied on slow, fragile ETL pipelines.

With Fabric’s new mirroring capabilities, SAP and Oracle data can now be connected directly into OneLake, ensuring continuous data flow that is always up to date.

In addition, Materialised Lake Views bring built-in data quality and lineage to the platform. Rather than depending on custom frameworks, engineers can simply declare checks in Spark SQL or PySpark and automatically generate quality reports along with clear lineage visualisations.

Before

  • Fragmented systems
  • Manual data quality checks
  • Fragile trust.

After

  • Unified data lake
  • Real-time availability 
  • Built-in trust

 

Benefits for CFO's

Gain real-time, accurate financial overviews without relying on IT teams or outdated reports. This enables faster responses to shifts in revenue and expenses.

Benefits for security admins

Confidence that data feeding AI and analytics is consistent, governed and traceable which reduces the risk of shadow pipelines.

Benefits for data engineers

No more stitching together lineage tools or writing custom data checks. Teams can concentrate on building reliable value pipelines instead of spending time debugging.

Benefits for AI engineers

Reliable and trustworthy data foundation for training and grounding AI agents which leads to better AI outputs.

 

AI-powered insights & agents

AI adoption often falters when data is not accessible in the right place. Fabric addresses this challenge by embedding AI directly into the environments where people already work:

  • Copilot: integrated into everyday applications, providing answers in plain language.

  • AI Agents: rapidly built with OneLake data and seamlessly deployed into Teams, Power BI, or Azure AI Studio.

Before

  • Manual dashboard exploration
  • AI projects requiring specialised teams

After

  • Accessible, contextual and quick-to-deploy AI in daily workflows

 

Benefits for CFO's

Users can ask questions like ‘Why did travel expenses rise?’ directly in financial applications and receive instant answers, enabling smarter and faster decision-making.

Benefits for security admins

Greater visibility into AI use cases with consistent application of governance policies across Copilot and AI agents.

Benefits for data engineers

Less time spent responding to ad hoc data requests as self-service capabilities reduce the operational load.

Benefits for AI engineers

Teams can focus on improving models rather than maintaining data plumbing, allowing AI agents to be deployed faster and closer to business needs.

 

Security and governance simplified

Managing security across Spark, SQL and BI has traditionally led to duplication and inconsistency. Fabric resolves this with centralised security and governance: define roles once and apply them everywhere.

In addition, customer-managed keys help organisations meet compliance requirements, while workplace-level network rules minimise the risk of misconfiguration.


Before

  • Complex
  • Fragmented
  • Compliance headaches

After

  • Consistent, centralised and compliant security model

 

Benefits for security admins

One central place to define RLS and CLS with encryption keys under full control and simple inbound and outbound rules, resulting in less stress and fewer errors.

Benefits for data engineers

Teams can rely on standardised security models so they no longer need to reimplement policies for each individual tool.

Benefits for AI engineers

Security is built directly into AI agents and data flows, ensuring initiatives move forward without being slowed by governance bottlenecks.

When, while the lovely valley teems with vapour around?

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin, pitiful to behold.

 

Engineering productivity & extensibility

Data teams often find themselves bogged down by maintaining pipelines, waiting on vendor-driven features, and navigating cumbersome tooling. Fabric streamlines modern engineering with Git-native CI/CD, open-source extensibility, next-generation Spark performance and an improved, more intuitive user interface.


Before

  • Slow deployments
  • Vendor lock-in
  • Manual Spark tuning
  • Clunky UI

After

  • Faster iterations
  • Open ecosystem
  • Improved performance
  • Smoother workflows

 

Benefits for security admins

CI/CD pipelines integrate governance checks automatically, which simplifies audits and ensures compliance.

Benefits for data engineers

Teams can finally apply DevOps best practices with Git and pipelines, spending less time firefighting and more time building, supported by Spark performance improvements and a better UI.

Benefits for AI engineers

An extensible ecosystem allows custom AI pipelines and experiments to be integrated directly into Fabric, enabling faster iterations without waiting on the Microsoft roadmap.

 

Enough about us,
let’s talk about you

Let us know what we can do for you? We are ready to listen to ensure you stay ahead of change!
ae_contact_valerie
Valerie Taerwe
Director Applications

2 Enough about us,
let’s talk about you

Let us know what we can do for you? We are ready to listen to ensure you stay ahead of change!
ae_contact_valerie
Valerie Taerwe
Director Applications

3 Enough about us,
let’s talk about you

Let us know what we can do for you? We are ready to listen to ensure you stay ahead of change!
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Test
Director Applications
AE

AE

Enough about us,
let’s talk about you

Let us know what we can do for you? We are ready to listen to ensure you stay ahead of change!
Kevin_1
Kevin_1
Kevin Stobbelaar
Director Data & AI