Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

A ton of new features for Microsoft Fabric were announced at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference recently. Here are all the new features that I found most interesting, with some released now and others coming soon:

With OneLake security (preview), you define access once, and Fabric enforces it consistently across all engines (Power BI, Spark notebook, SQL analytics endpoint, Excel, Onelake file explorer, API calls). Data owners can create security roles, grant precise permissions, and control access at the row and column level—for example, restricting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) while keeping other data available. This security propagates automatically, ensuring that whether users query via SQL or build Power BI reports, they only see what they’re authorized to access. OneLake security replaces the existing OneLake data access roles preview feature. OneLake security will be available in public preview within a few months. In the meantime, if you are interested in trying OneLake security and providing feedback, please visit this early access sign-up page. More info
Copilot and AI capabilities will be enabled for all paid SKUs in Fabric, making these tools accessible to everyone within the coming weeks. With this latest update, customers on F2 and above can use Copilot and AI capabilities, such as Fabric data agents, to streamline workflows, generate insights, and drive impactful decisions. More info
Now available is a preview of a migration experience, called Migration Assistant, that is natively built into the Fabric UI, enabling Azure Synapse Analytics (data warehouse) customers to transition seamlessly to Microsoft Fabric. With a built-in, intelligent assessment, guided support, and AI-powered assistance, this experience simplifies migration of code and data while helping customers unlock Fabric’s unified data foundation, AI-driven analytics, and enhanced performance—without the complexity of traditional migrations. More info
Organizations can now use Azure AI Foundry to connect customized, conversational agents, created in Fabric. AI developers can now use Azure AI Agent Service to securely ground AI agent outputs with enterprise knowledge in Fabric data agents (formerly known as AI skills), so that responses are accurate, relevant, and contextually aware. 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. . More info
The Variable library (preview) is a new item type in Microsoft Fabric that allows users to define and manage variables at the workspace level, so they could soon be used across various workspace items, such as data pipelines (already available!), notebooks, Shortcut for lakehouse and more. More info
The preview of User Data Functions introduces a way for developers to implement and reuse custom business logic in Fabric data science and data engineering workflows, streamlining development and improving efficiency. More info
The preview of Command Line Interface (CLI) in Fabric introduces a new terminal that allows users and admins to execute commands across Fabric using interactive prompts or scripts, enabling a seamless, code-first experience without relying on clicks. More info
The general availability of Tags, which allows users to optimally describe items they own, and help enhance organization and discoverability of data in Fabric. More info
Several enhancements to Dataflow Gen2 including the general availability of Incremental Refresh, and the preview to save a Dataflow Gen1 as a Dataflow Gen2.
Database Mirroring has been enhanced with key new enterprise capabilities, including a new source (Azure Database for PostgreSQL flexible server) and support for connecting to data sources over the On-premises and Virtual Network Data Gateways.
The preview of key orchestration enhancements is now available, enabling the creation of metadata-driven pipelines that orchestrate Dataflow Gen2 (CI/CD) parameterized invocation from Data Pipelines.
Read more about all the Data Factory enhancements in the What’s new with Fabric Data Factory.
Concerning real-time intelligence (RTI), announced was the preview of new eventstream connectors which allows users to bring in data from additional non-Microsoft sources, including Weather, Solace PubSub+, ADX Table Streamify, MQTT v5, Event Grid Namespaces, and Confluent with Schema Registry. More info
The preview of Autoscale Billing for Spark helps optimize Spark job costs by offloading Data Engineering workloads to a serverless billing mode. Capacity admins can set a max capacity units (CUs) limit in capacity settings, ensuring Spark jobs use dedicated CUs instead of shared Fabric Capacity.
A new Copilot experience in Fabric notebooks that improves productivity with in-cell interactions, better code generation, and seamless Fabric integration.
The preview of AI functions provides powerful capabilities to apply LLM-powered transformations, such as summarization, classification, and text generation to your OneLake data—all with a single line of code.
A modern get-data experience with OneLake catalog integration in Microsoft Excel (in Office Insiders Fast) enables users to explore the OneLake catalog directly from Excel, expanding accessibility beyond the existing Microsoft Teams integration.
The preview of Direct Lake semantic models in Power BI desktop, which allows users to build Power BI semantic models for lightning-fast reports that query data directly from OneLake without scheduling refreshes and without data duplication. This feature will also enable users to add in tables from multiple Fabric artifacts in the same Direct Lake semantic model for ultimate reusability of OneLake data.
Coming soon, the preview of Microsoft Purview for Copilot in Power BI. The integration will enable discovery of data risks such as sensitive data in user prompts and responses, protect sensitive data with Insider Risk Management to identify and investigate risky AI usage, and govern AI usage with audit, eDiscovery, retention policies, and non-compliant usage detection.
SQL audit logs are now in preview in Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse! Audit Logs provide a detailed record of warehouse activity, capturing essential information such as when events occur, which triggered them, and the T-SQL statement behind the event. This feature is crucial for security and compliance, helping organizations monitor access patterns, detect anomalies, and meet regulatory requirements.
Many new features coming to help with performance for data warehouse: result-set caching, self-managed performance for scale, intelligent workload management, custom SQL pools, data clustering, warehouse snapshots, proactive statistics refresh, and incremental statistics refresh.
New features coming to shortcuts and mirroring: Cross-network connectivity, table discovery, manage shortcut sessions, key value support, and mirror sources behind a firewall.