Microsoft Fabric Conference Recap

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, along with about 4,100 others.

The conference was full of great information, announcements, networking, parties, and swag. They have already announced the dates for next year, and you can register starting in May. It will be at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas once again, taking place April 1 - 3, 2025.

I would recommend this conference if you are:

• Interested in learning more about Fabric overall
• Interested in deep dives into certain Fabric technologies
• Wanting to stay up to date with all the latest announcements about Microsoft Fabric
• Wanting to give feedback to the Fabric product teams
• Looking to network with other professionals who work/will work with Fabric

I share my thoughts on this year's conference below.

The Sessions

I thought the mix of sessions was good. There was a large presence from the Microsoft product teams as well as several sessions from Microsoft MVPs like myself. I presented a session on my own called Power BI and Accessibility: Bridging the Gap for All Audiences, where I demonstrated tips to make your Power BI reports more accessible for the people who need to consume them. I also co-presented a session with Steve Howard called Data Warehouse Workload Management: A Journey from Chaos to Control. A lot of people know me for my Power BI work, but I have been doing data warehousing my entire career. I was so excited that I was able to team up with Steve to present this content. And the topic is exciting because Fabric warehouses already have a lot of workload management automated for us. On top of the built-in features, we also discussed other workload isolation strategies you can employ to ensure your warehouse is running smoothly. Beyond my sessions, there were several overview sessions for people just getting familiar with Fabric as well as some deeper sessions that explain how things work and how to implement certain solutions such as a medallion architecture. With Fabric being so new and broad, and still evolving rapidly, the overview sessions were helpful for all of us. I think we might see the mix of sessions change a bit next year as the platform and customer skills mature.

Interaction with the Product Team

If you have been using Fabric and you were wishing for a new feature or a change in an existing feature, there were several opportunities to provide that feedback and get into conversations with the product team. We could stop by the Microsoft booth and speak with someone. On the last day, there was an area near the community lounge where you could provide feedback to Microsoft via conversations and sticky notes about the user experience. Throughout all 3 days, I ended up talking to several program managers about my concerns and excitement about different areas of Fabric. I think the Fabric team is doing a great job of soliciting and acting on feedback. I'm not always patient about new features, and there are some that I have been waiting on for months that I think should have been there from the beginning of general availability. But no one can deny that they are making quick progress. And this conference showed that they are listening. I had a great conversation with Charles Webb that made me feel heard and feel confident about the future of Fabric warehouses.

The Announcements

There were SO MANY announcements of new features being released to preview and GA as well as several announcements about features coming soon. You can read Arun's blog post about the announcements for more detail.

Some of the new features I'm excited about are:

• Automatic OneLake integration for import semantic models
• Public preview release for Azure SQL Database Mirroring
• Public preview of folders in workspaces
• Data pipelines supported in the on-premises data gateway
• Semantic model refresh activity in Fabric pipelines

Some features announced that you should keep an eye out for are:

• Metrics layer
• Task flows
• Tags
• External data sharing
• Data quality rules in Purview

The Swag

If you were in need of drinkware, stickers, or backpacks, this was a good conference. I appreciate that these were not cheap/low quality cups and water bottles.

I also scored some great stickers to add to my laptop.

I still have some stickers from MVP Summit to add (sparkly Power BI and Fabric stickers), but I have lots of room for them. If you have suggestions for good stickers I need to acquire, let me know!

The Community

This was a great conference to bring together the Microsoft data platform community. It had a bit of everything: lakehouses, warehouses, batch ETL, streaming and real-time analytics, transactional databases, reporting and analytics, AI, and more. This is great for me because my work spans across several of these technologies, and there are few conferences that have a healthy presence in each of these areas.

It was really great to talk with Erik Roll , Shannon Lindsay , Stephanie Bruno , Reid Havens ????♂? , Alex Dupler , Melody Zacharias , Nikola Ilic , and several others.

I also got to meet some new people at the diversity luncheon, and we had a great conversation about accessibility in the workplace.

As part of my MVP duties, I helped staff an MVP-led Ask the Experts booth where I helped answer questions about Fabric. It was cool to see what organizations were planning and implementing, and helpful to see where they are encountering challenges.

Thanks

I would be remiss if I did not take a moment to thank everyone who helped organize the conference. A special thank you to Jason Himmelstein and Rie Merritt for all your hard work.