European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference Keynote

The Microsoft Fabric Community Conference is taking place this week in Stockholm, Sweden. There are 3300 attendees which is amazing.  The Keynote was entitled Microsoft Fabric Vision & Roadmap – Analytics in the Era of AI.  The keynote speakers; Arun Ulag, Kim Manis, Amir Netz, Marco Casalaina, Wangui McKelvey and Rudra Mitra from Microsoft.

The announcements blog contains a vast number of innovative enhancements and capability updates. The blog is: European Fabric Community Conference 2024: Building an AI-powered data platform

Fabric is about providing a unified data platform for AI transformation with these 3 areas

• AI-powered development: Fabric can give teams the AI-powered tools needed for any data project in a pre-integrated and optimized SaaS environment.
• An AI-powered data estate: Fabric can help you access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single, open data lake, work from the same copy of data across analytics engines, and use that data to power AI innovation 
• AI-powered insights: Fabric can empower everyone to better understand their data with AI-powered visuals and Q&A experiences embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps they use every day. 

Microsoft Fabric is shown in the AI Copilot stack.

There is a new exam available to enhance skilling in data engineering DP-700 This Certification measures Fabric data engineer skills:

• Implementing and managing an analytics solution
• Ingesting and transforming data
• Monitoring and optimizing an analytics solution

Bringing all the skills together for data engineering, data science, and data analytics. You can read more here

 There  are numerous technical announcements

You can see the list of GA features shipped for network security, data security and governance. There is an End-to-End Security Whitepaper to the read aka.ms/FabricSecurityWhitepaper 

The public preview of the new copy job item provides

• Built-in support for copying data between workspaces
• Streamline copying data into and across OneLake
• Setup automatic incremental copy

To help with deployment, the public preview was announced of the Terraform Provider for Microsoft Fabric. This will help empower deployment, management, and governance. This Microsoft Fabric Infrastructure as Code (IaC) new Terraform Provider lets you use the same tools and processes already employed for Microsoft Azure and other cloud resources.

• Check out the provider on the Terraform Registry: https://aka.ms/FabricTF
• To help you get started, there is a handy Quick Starts repository with examples: GitHub Examples for using the Terraform Provider for Microsoft Fabric

Access Azure Databricks Unity Catalog tables directly from Fabric via the new Mirrored Azure Databricks Catalog feature, now in Public Preview https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-US/blog/databricks-unity-catalog-tables-available-in-microsoft-fabric/

A new feature in Fabric: Lakehouse schemas https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/organizing-your-tables-with-lakehouse-schemas-and-more-public-preview/

Public Preview of T-SQL Notebook in Fabric  https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-public-preview-of-t-sql-notebook-in-fabric

The General Availability of Copilot for Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric  https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-the-general-availability-of-copilot-for-data-factory-in-microsoft-fabric

All the in dept announcements are on the Fabric Blog. 

The unified data culture was mentioned between Fabric and Office connected through Power BI. 

There are lots more releases out there. This is such an exciting time in the Data and AI space. The exciting announcement is that the conference will be back next year.