I attended the Microsoft Fabric conference for the first time last week. I wanted to provide a guide that CIOs and CEO’s could leverage to understand how they could utilize these new announcements at the 2025 Fabric Conference to obtain a competitive advantage. To be transparent, I was skeptical because Microsoft consistently changes or rebrands its analytics platform every three to five years. We have gone from Parallel Data Warehouses (PDW) to Analytics Platform Services (APS), Azure Services, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and Azure Synapse Analytics, bringing us to Microsoft Fabric.
John Sterrett from ProcureSQL attends the 2025 Microsoft Fabric Conference.
To my surprise, after this conference, I have gone from seeing Fabric as Microsoft’s current take on Analytics to how it will stand out as an analytics platform of choice for people who want a simple, quick, and easy way to do analytics with the tools they already love using.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will only be as good as your data. Garbage in still equals garbage out, or as I like to call it, building a trusted dumpster fire. Preparing your data for AI will be the key to success with your AI Projects. Microsoft clearly understands this by focusing on preparing your data for AI with fabric mirroring, fabric databases, and SQL Server 2025. My takeaway is that you won’t have to get ready if you stay ready.
Copilot for all Fabric SKUs
Microsoft is committed to giving more people access to its AI tools as a commitment to this. In the coming weeks, users on F2 fabric compute and above can utilize Copilot. You can also use Fabric Copilot capacity, a new feature that simplifies setup, user management, and access to Copilot across different tiers.
Why Fabric Mirroring Is A Game Changer
Those following us aren’t new to the concept and advantages of fabric mirroring. One of the biggest mistakes we see that multiplies the odds of your analytics projects failing is incorrectly landing your data into your analytics platform of choice. Either the data is missing, transformed incorrectly, or stops coming in.
Microsoft provides what they call “mirroring” to help solve the problem of getting your data into your landing zone. With Azure SQL Databases and fabric databases, it’s as easy as a few clicks. Coming soon, you will have similar experiences with PostgreSQL in Azure, Oracle, SQL Server in VMs, and on-premises. What about other apps/data stores? Open mirroring is coming soon, and you can leverage it to get your other data into the Fabric landing zone.
Multi-Cloud Shortcuts
Microsoft has partnered with Snowflake to provide iceberg-formatted data across Fabric without any data movement or duplication. You can use a shortcut to point directly to an Iceberg table written using Snowflake in Azure. Snowflake has also added the ability to write Iceberg tables directly into OneLake.
Apache Iceberg tables can be used with Fabric due to a feature called metadata virtualization. Behind the scenes, this feature utilizes Apache XTable.
The key takeaway is that you can now have users use both Snowflake and Fabric to work on the same data, and it won’t involve data movement or duplication. Letting your data professionals utilize the tools they use best is a huge win.
Fabric Databases
Microsoft Fabric Databases is the new kid on the block, and it’s already seeing traction as the first fully SaaS-ifyed database offering. Fabric databases are built for ease of use as a unified data platform. You can create databases in a few clicks and have zero nobs to maintain as Microsoft fully manages the databases. Fabric database data is automatically mirrored into OneLake for analytics.
The key takeaway is that you can utilize Microsoft Fabric for application development and eliminate the need for a database infrastructure as a service MSP/partner. You can eliminate this cost as you should always get exponential value from your data MSP (what we built our practice focusing on), not just body for monitoring or keeping the lights up and running.
SQL Server 2025
Microsoft announced some updates to SQL Server 2025 at the keynote and in other breakout sessions. While it is still in private preview, it was easy to see how anyone who could write T-SQL could leverage models and vectors without knowing much about vectors or algorithms. GraphQL will allow developers to hit API endpoints to consume data like most other APIs. JSON will be treated as a 1st class citizen with its data type and indexes to help developers access their JSON data quickly and easily.
With SQL Server 2025, you can mirror your data to Microsoft Fabric with Zero ETL, zero code, our OneLake, and near real-time mirroring at no additional cost and without enabling change data capture. This combined will help reduce your total cost of ownership. There will be no more extra compute costs for Availability Groups; just continue to utilize your Fabric compute.
The key takeaway is that Microsoft continues investing in making SQL Server more accessible from the ground to the cloud. SQL Server will continue to make it easier to help you utilize your data inside and outside the relational platform.
Other notable features
Autoscale Billing for Spark—optimize Spark job costs by offloading your data’s extraction, load, and transformation to a serverless billing model.
Command-line interface—Fabric CLI is now in preview. Built on fabric APIs, it is designed for automation. There will be less clicky-clicky and more scripts that you can version control.
API and Terraform Integration—Automate key aspects of your fabric platform now by utilizing Terraform. If you have used it with Azure, get ready to use it with Fabric as well.
CI/CD enhancements—With Fabric’s git integration, multiple developers can frequently make incremental workspace updates. You could also utilize variable libraries and delivery pipelines to help get your changes vetted and tested quickly through your various testing environments.
User Data Functions—Fabric user data functions is a platform that allows you to host and run applications on Fabric. Data engineers can write custom business logic and embed it into the fabric ecosystem.
Statistics That Caught My Attention
- Microsoft Fabric supports over 19,000 organizations, including 74% of Fortune 500 companies.
- Power BI has over 275k users, including 95% of Fortune 500 companies
- 45k consultants trained, 23k partner certifications in its first year
- One billion new apps will be built in the next five years.
- 87% of leaders believe AI will give their organization a competitive edge
- 30,000+ fabric certifications completed in twelve months
I will be back next year and will provide you with another write-up like the one I produced this week, in case you cannot make it.
About ProcureSQL
ProcureSQL is the industry leader in providing data architecture as a service to enable companies to harness their data to grow their business. ProcureSQL is 100% onshore in the United States and supports the four quadrants of data, including application modernization, database management, data analytics, and data visualization. ProcureSQL works as a guide, mentor, leader, and implementer to provide innovative solutions to drive better business outcomes for all businesses. Click here to learn more about our service offerings.
Do you have questions about leveraging AI, Microsoft Fabric, or the Microsoft Data Platform? You can chat with me for free one-on-one or contact the team. We would love to share our knowledge and experience with you.