Pinja’s Fabric operators Patrik, Aleksi, Jani and Teemu in Stockholm
You can read previous parts in the series via links below:
What is Microsoft Fabric? Part 1: From the past to the present
What is Microsoft Fabric? Part 2: Technology
What is Microsoft Fabric? Part 3: Performance
What is Microsoft Fabric? Part 4: Licenses
A group of BI architects from Pinja attended the Fabric conference hosted by Microsoft in Stockholm in September. The conference offered several presentations and trainings related to new and upcoming features, as well as community spirit. It was not a small gathering; there were over 3,000 participants. A large group of Microsoft representatives were on hand to help with even the most technical issues (shout out to them for helping with our Purview licensing issues!).
FabCon was a similar Microsoft Fabric community conference in the spring in Las Vegas, but the European community will also have its own event in the fall. Fabric is Microsoft’s favorite child, which was obvious to the attendees in Stockholm. Missing features and new functions are being added at a pace that might even frighten people used to the world of SQL Server. Dozens of new major features are released every month. Go and see for yourself: link. It is also worth mentioning that Fabric is not only built by Microsoft’s experts, but MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) from all over the world also contribute in the development.
The event covered a lot of topics and provided content for several blog posts. Below are a few of the topics presented.
Several training sessions and presentations based on real-time Fabric implementations provided a comprehensive understanding of Fabric’s current and future real-time data capabilities. During the first training day, we and 100 other eager participants were able to redline the capacity of F1024 by running individual notebooks producing a heavy real-time data stream!
Microsoft Fabric offers good tools for processing real-time data streams with a delay of just a few seconds. Fabric has the recently introduced Real-Time Hub feature, which brings together all objects related to real-time data processing under one hub. Fabric has rich connectors for different sources that can be easily added to the Event Stream. For example, data sent from the Azure Event Hub can be effortlessly configured as a source for Event Stream. The data can then be routed to the KQL database in Eventhouse or to the data warehouse in Lakehouse.
There were some impressive demos, especially around AI. Several Copilot solutions were presented, integrated directly into the Fabric portal for almost all needs. Other tools will have their own pilots soon, and SQL Server Management Studio, so beloved by some developers, will not be left out. Even if some of these features are still behind a rather high paywall, it was ensured that Microsoft is working hard to lower the threshold.
It’s also easy to see that talk-to-your-data solutions will play an important role in data analytics. They enable new self-service solutions for reporting that were previously difficult to implement.
On the other hand, even AI-based solutions require accurate data, so data modeling and metadata are things to consider. In addition to data quality, user rights to different data must be well managed. It’s no wonder that data governance is a hot topic today.
Practical experiences with Fabric were shared, even by several large players. They show that the product is doing many things right. Fabric adapts to an organization’s architecture solution needs with workspaces and capacities of varying sizes. The fact that Real-Time and AI tools are readily available was well received. Another vital part is that the use and support of multi-cloud architecture and open data formats. Multi-Cloud architecture is supported in the form of Shortcuts, for example, but in addition, OneLake can be used as a native data warehouse for Snowflake, for example, in the same way that data can be used in Fabric’s data pipelines.
There is facing a lot of excitement around Fabric: DP-600 is Microsoft’s most popular certification ever, and with tens of thousands of organizations have implemented Fabric. Pinja also has several certified experts working on various Fabric projects.
Discussing experiences internationally was a breath of fresh air and something we needed. Fabric provides alternatives for different stages of work, which leads to the need to make choices. It’s nice to be challenged and think broadly. The event confirmed that we at Pinja have made the right choices when it comes to architecture.
At the end of the day, the most important thing is the data and the value it provides; it’s not all about the technology. However, if you are starting a new data warehouse project or renewing the old one, our unconditional recommendation goes to Fabric. Fabric’s scalability, versatility and timelessness make it a safe choice. We can’t stress enough that platforms don’t make you happy – the right architectural standards must be in place first.
Our next blog post will focus on deploying Fabric. Stay tuned!
Register for the Microsoft Fabric 2025 conference
What is Microsoft Fabric? Part 1: From the past to the present
What is Microsoft Fabric? Part 2: Technology
What is Microsoft Fabric? Part 3: Performance
What is Microsoft Fabric? Part 4: Licenses
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