Highlights from Microsoft’s Fabric conference

You can still feel the buzz in the air after the recent Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, and our Fabric expert, Brian Bønk Rueløkke, has returned home to Denmark after his three-day participation at this global event.

In a previous blog post, Brian shared his electric experience directly from the conference in fabulous Las Vegas and listed all the new things coming to Microsoft Fabric soon. And there was a lot to look forward to!

Now, back home, Brian has had time to process the highlights from the trip and will share them with us in this interview.

What were the main takeaways from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference?

“I think the biggest thing that struck me was being constantly reminded of being part of a really engaging community. It’s almost like a second family, where we help each other with problems and have inspiring conversations. We discussed things like leveraging the existing services to better help people understand and use the fabric platform. The Data Platform Community is a global network of experts, and the threads in the Microsoft organization are very deep. Once you’ve been a part of the community for a while, you get to know the right people and can contact them directly if you have any issues,” Brian tells us.

How do you become a part of the community?

“It’s actually just a matter of beginning to share your knowledge or blog posts and making yourself available to conferences. Reach out to people in the community like me. They are quite easy to find. You can either find the MVP or an existing speaker from one of the communities. Everyone in the community is open and helpful to help people join the community. If you have more ambitions, there are distinctive programs for new speakers to try to have a session talk at a conference. It is a complete program with a mentor, and you get a complete process of how to structure your speech, how to structure your slides, and how to get on stage and present,” Brian says.

The Microsoft Fabric Community was officially announced at Microsoft Build 2023 on May 23, 20233. While the exact number of experts within the community isn’t specified, the community has evolved over time, with contributions from various data and analytics tools leading up to Fabric.

Brian continues, “Once you are part of the community, you can always ask questions and discuss things that are not working and how to work with the existing products and the existing releases that are coming. The Community also provides some ability to join the so-called private previews of features from Microsoft that are not yet released for public review.”

Which new Fabric feature are you looking forward to the most?

“I was quite excited about the full DevOps implementation. That is quite huge. I’m also quite interested in the changes that they have to work with the semantic models directly in Power BI, so we no longer have to use the web portal. However, we can in the future use Power BI for desktop to work directly with semantic models directly in Fabric. The third thing out of the very long list is that the implementation of more copilots all around the fabric is also very exciting, and I’m looking forward to seeing them in action. They are all expected to come this year. Some of them are in public preview right now, and some were sneak peeks delivered in Las Vegas and will be available later this year.”

And for you, what are your plans for this year?

“I’m speaking at the SQL Day in Poland in mid-May. Then, directly from there, I’m driving to Germany to speak at a conference called Datagrillen. It will be a full week of two exciting conferences. I’m really looking forward to those two,” Brian ends.

Brian’s top 3 highlights from the conference

1. Full DevOps Implementation: New Fabric elements around CI/CD capabilities. Pipelines, Data Warehouses, Spark Job Definition, and Spark environments are now supported for Git integration. Along with a new branch feature directly in Fabric, it is now possible to work with branches and create new workspaces based on this work without going to Azure DevOps.

2. Changes to Semantic Models in Power BI: Users will soon be able to work with semantic models directly in Power BI without using the web portal.

3. Implementation of More Copilots: The introduction of more Copilots all around Microsoft Fabric is another exciting development.