This September, over 3,000 attendees gathered in Stockholm for the inaugural European Fabric Conference, held from the 24th to the 27th. As expected, the event offered a fantastic opportunity to learn, network, and even meet industry rockstars like Patrick and Adam from Guy in a Cube. One of the main highlights of such conferences is learning about upcoming platform features, and this year’s Stockholm event was no exception.
If you subscribed to the MS Fabric Blog during FabCon, you might have felt overwhelmed by the barrage of new feature announcements. Thankfully, Microsoft provided a full recap to help us digest the exciting updates.
Fabric Community Conference Europe Recap | Microsoft Fabric Blog | Microsoft Fabric
In this article, I’ll give you a rundown of the event, highlighting the most intriguing new features (in my opinion) and addressing a few concerns that surfaced. Let’s dive in.
Power BI: Is it enough?
For those who rely on Power BI, there were only two key announcements, which felt a bit underwhelming, especially since recent Power BI updates have also slowed down. So, what’s new?
Copilot made its appearance, but I’ve discussed my concerns about it extensively in previous articles, so I won’t dwell on it here. The second update? NFC Tag Support in the Power BI mobile apps. While mobile reporting is a niche, many people working onsite, in factories and warehouses, rely on mobile devices for quick access to business data. This NFC support will help users quickly retrieve important information, alongside existing barcode functionality. It’s a valuable feature, reminding us that Power BI plays a critical role in delivering business applications as part of the Power Platform.
However, that’s about it for Power BI. The September updates weren’t groundbreaking either. Dark Mode, for instance, was highly anticipated but fell short for me. While it works well for tools like Power Query, the Report Canvas still features a large white space unless you manually adjust the background, which takes away from the dark-mode experience. Many others share this sentiment.
A more exciting feature, although a bit overshadowed, is Org Apps, which allows creating multiple Power BI apps per workspace. While audiences improved access management, sometimes creating a new app with unique branding or user experience makes more sense.
Should Power BI Devs be worried?
FabCon Announcements
- Fabric Capacity SKU Calculator – Very important feature for new customers, who try to estimate the Capacity size required to start their Fabric journey. I joined the private preview but can’t share much about it as these are the rules. For sure it’s a basic calculator today and I shared the feedback with product team what could be improved. I hope it’s more mature once it is released to public preview.
- Service Principal support for Fabric APIs – Fantastic news for all those seeking automation opportunities. With Service Principal you can use Fabric APIs using Apps outside of Fabric. Not everything is supported yet of course, but product team works on enabling more APIs. Give it a try and stay tuned for more 🙂
- Tags for Fabric Artifacts – Microsoft finally decided to improve the area of Artifacts Metadata. We already have domains and subdomains to properly organize workspaces. Now we will also be able to tag our items. tags will help to discover the data, but ideally, I hope at some point of they are also exposed in APIs, which could be used to allocate the Capacity cost at more granular level.
- Working with large data types in Fabric Warehouse – Max size for a single cell is increased from 8 KB to 1 MB, which is huge difference. For me specifically this means better support for JSON documents, as this is the only use where I currently care about large data types in Warehouse. But I am more than sure that you will find more interesting use cases 🙂
- Public Preview of T-SQL Notebook in Fabric – In our team there are people who feel more comfortable with SQL than python, now they can use notebooks and leverage the spark engine to efficiently query large datasets, create new tables or views directly in the notebook.
- High Concurrency Mode for Notebooks in Pipelines for Fabric Spark – There are two reasons why I picked this feature for the summary. Notebooks included in Data Pipelines will now be packed into high concurrency session. Feature available so far standalone notebooks is now supported also for Data Pipelines which means: Faster Pipelines Execution and Cost Savings. Kudos to the team for finally landing the feature that was promised long ago.
- Incremental Refresh in Dataflow Gen2 – One of the features where usually the comment is “it should be available long ago”. Of course, but it doesn’t mean we can’t be happy about it 😀 Dataflows Gen 2 is great low code tool, especially for Power BI Developers who would like to start working with Lakehouse and Direct Lake mode in Power BI. Dataflows in terms of the performance are much worse than Notebooks, that’s why incremental refresh is critical to have a scalable solution. It is enabled slightly different than regular Dataflows but works in exactly same way.
- In previous company I was working a lot of with the data from this ERP system, that’s I must at least mention capability to Integrate your SAP data into Microsoft Fabric. There are four connectors available through On-premises Gateway. It’s very common that companies already invested a lot of money in SAP data ingestion into their data stores. If you already have data loaded in Azure Data Lake Storage or Amazon S3, you can easily create a shortcut to Fabric to utilize that data. However, if you are starting fresh, you could bring the data directly to Fabric.
Conclusion
Thanks for sticking with me till the end. See you in the next article!
