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The Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2025 in Las Vegas just wrapped up, and it brought some exciting updates! Whether you’re a data engineer, analyst, or just someone who loves working with Microsoft Fabric, there’s a lot to unpack. The event drew an impressive crowd of around 6,000 attendees from across industries.

Let’s dive straight into the key announcements! First up, we’ll take a look at the new capabilities coming to Microsoft Fabric.

OneLake Security – A Game Changer in Data Protection

Managing data security across multiple platforms or semantic models is often complex, leading to either over-restriction or unintentional data exposure. OneLake Security is Microsoft Fabric’s new centralized approach to data protection.

What’s New?

• Define Once, Enforce Everywhere – Set security rules at the lake level, and Fabric applies them automatically across SQL Endpoints, Spark notebooks, and Power BI
• Granular Data Access – Data owners can control access down to the row and column level, ensuring users only see what they’re authorized to. This ensures that sensitive information, such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), is accessible only to authorized users. ​

For instance, a retail company can limit store managers to their store’s sales data while giving finance full access—without separate security setups. With OneLake Security, admins set rules once, and Fabric enforces them everywhere, keeping data secure and governance simple.

OneLake Security is set to roll out in preview in the coming months! But if you’re eager to get a head start, you can sign up for early access and try it out in your workspaces. Microsoft is actively gathering feedback—so this is your chance to explore it firsthand and help shape its future!

AI Skills is now Data agents!

Microsoft Fabric now features data agents (previously AI Skills) which are AI-powered assistants that retrieve, understand, and analyze data to help teams make faster, smarter decisions—without needing constant manual input. These agents can connect to multiple data sources, learn from patterns, and take actions based on real-time insights.

What’s New?

• Organizations can tap into the powerful combination of Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI Foundry to create custom AI agents that are smart and intuitive.
• Azure AI Foundry enables businesses to connect conversational agents created in Microsoft Fabric with the Azure AI Agent Service. This collaboration combines Fabric’s advanced data analysis with Foundry’s generative AI technology to create intelligent, domain-specific AI agents that deliver accurate, relevant, and context-aware responses.

This integration brings together Fabric’s powerful data analysis with Azure AI’s advanced AI models, unlocking new possibilities for conversational AI in business workflows.

Seamless Migration from Azure Synapse to Fabric

Moving your workloads from Azure Synapse Analytics to Microsoft Fabric just got way easier. The new Migration Assistant (available by the second week of April) comes with smart assessments, guided support, and AI-powered support to help you migrate both your data and metadata. It converts the Synapse schema into Fabric’s format, thereby cutting down the manual effort required from a migration.

Copilot for Everyone: Now Available on All Paid SKUs

Great news coming in for all Fabric users – Copilot and AI features are rolling out to all paid SKUs, starting from F2 and above (by the end of April 2025). This move comes straight from community feedback—and it’s a big stride forward from Microsoft making AI in Fabric more accessible and productive for everyone.

What this means?

More teams can tap into the power of AI-assisted workflows, Fabric data agents, and smart insights without needing premium tiers. Whether you are into building reports, wrangling data, or exploring insights, Copilot is well within your reach to help speed up things and make your day easier.

Platform Enhancements

Now, let’s switch our focus towards the platform-wide enhancements. These updates are designed to make working with data in Fabric smarter, faster, and seamless than ever. Here’s a quick rundown of the updates –

• A new Command Line Interface (CLI) in preview lets users interact with Fabric through terminal commands. This is great, especially for those who prefer scripts.
• Fabric now supports better CI/CD with variable libraries, GitHub service principals, and updated deployment APIs—making version control and automation easier of dev teams.
• User Data Functions (in preview) allow developers to reuse custom business logic across workflows—saving time and boosting efficiency.
• Tags are now Generally Available (GA) that help teams categorize, search, and manage assets in Fabric easily.

Data Integration Enhancements

• Dataflow Gen2 enhancements—incremental data refresh is now GA. This reduces refresh times and minimizes resource usage. Another capability (in preview) allows Power BI dataflow creators migrate their dataflows from Dataflow Gen1 to Dataflow Gen2.
• Users can now mirror data from more sources like Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server and even connect securely to on-prem or VNet-protected sources using Data Gateway. Plus, with Apache Airflow jobs support, teams can orchestrate complex data workflows with a serverless runtime.

Real-time Intelligence Enhancements

• Fabric now supports real-time Azure and Fabric events (currently in GA) and more eventstream connectors (in Preview). These let users react faster to data from different sources.

Partner/ISV Integrations

• Fabric now supports broader ISV Partner integrations from companies such as Osmos, Profisee, Celonis. These integrations further expand the capabilities what you can achieve from within the Fabric platform.

OneLake Enhancements

• In addition to OneLake Security, you will get a better experience and support for Excel, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Platform. In addition to these, cross-tenant data sharing makes OneLake more open & enterprise-ready.

Empowering Business Users with AI Capabilities

• Power BI Desktop now includes Direct Lake semantic models (in Preview) using which users can build reports quickly that query data from OneLake without data duplication and scheduled refreshes. It also supports data annotations in PowerPoint where users can add descriptive text within a visualization.

Stronger Governance with Microsoft Purview

• Purview Integrations (in Preview) help detect and manage AI-related data risks, enforce DLP policies across data types, and provide data observability for better quality control.

Wrapping Up!

With nearly 6000 attendees, the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference was packed with energy, ideas, and innovation. From powerful AI-driven updates to deeper integrations and smarter data capabilities, it’s clear that Fabric is shaping the future of analytics.

At VNB Consulting, we’re not just following the momentum—we’re building on it. Our Healthcare Analytics Solutions are powered by Microsoft Fabric and Power BI, helping provider organizations unify data, uncover meaningful insights, and drive impact across revenue cycle, financial, clinical, and admissions domains.

Want to see how Fabric can transform your data strategy? Let’s Connect— reach out to the team.

*References from Microsoft Article.