03
Oct
FABCON – European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2024 – Stockholm
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Ernst and I (Nicky) had the privilege of attending the inaugural Fabric Community Conference Europe in Stockholm, it was an amazing experience full of learning, sharing, and community collaboration.
So how did we spend the week?
- Monday kicked off for Nicky with a visit to the Swedish Power BI and Fabric User Group — always a pleasure to connect with local experts and enthusiasts. Thanks to Alexander Arvidsson and Linda Torrång for having him on their Fabric discussion panel, together with Shabnam, Fatima, Reitse, and Marc.
- Tuesday was all about the #MVP pre-day for Nicky, getting some insightful discussions in before the conference officially began.
- Ernst joined the ‘training Tuesday‘ and was emerged in Real-Time Intelligence for a whole day.
- On Wednesday, the event started with the keynote and sessions with lots of new Fabric announcements (more below!)
- At 5 PM on Wednesday, Nicky had the honor of delivering his session, A Day in the Life of a(n Accidental) Fabric Administrator. The session was good received with a lot of engagement and thoughtful questions from the attendees.
- After the keynote on Thursday, it was all about sessions, giving back to the community and connecting. In between the sessions, Nicky joined other people in packing hygiene kits at the community lounge, and he wrapped up the day with an Ask the Experts shift in the expo hall — always a rewarding experience to help others with their tech challenges.
- And Friday also started with a keynote, followed by more detailed sessions for example on TMDL view, and of course traveling home after an inspiring week.
Looking back, these are the new features we liked the most:
Platform, governance
- Surge protection for Fabric capacities
- This can help protect your capacity from overloading
- Tags on items
- Delegation of tenant settings to domains and workspaces (coming soon)
- Next to delegation to capacity admins, you can also delegate certain settings to domains and workspace admins
- Terraform provider for Fabric (preview)
- Terraform is used to distribute content with an Infrastructure as Code solution and is the leading provider in the market
- Support for Service Principals for Fabric REST API’s
- Most Fabric API’s now support the use of SPN’s. More API’s will be added later
- Fabric GIT integration (GA)
Power BI
- Metric sets (preview)
- This is the evolution of Goals and Scorecards and contains new ways of using these features
- Live edit a Direct Lake model in Power BI Desktop (PBID) (preview)
- You can now use PBID to edit a Direct Lake model
- Create a Direct Lake model in PBID (Preview)
- And you can also start in PBID to create a Direct Lake model
- TMDL View tab in PBID (Preview)
- In addition to the DAX query view, a TMDL view will be added to edit your semantic model with TMDL code
- Dark mode in PBID (preview)
- Org(anizational) apps (preview)
- This allows you to create multiple apps per workspace
- Version history for semantic models in the web (private preview)
- Currenly this keeps 5 versions of your model and it contains data + metadata
- OneLake integration for semantic models in Import mode
- For large models, this will be switched on by default for large semantic models by Microsoft, without additional CU/cost.
Data Factory
- Dataflow Gen2 incremental refresh (preview)
- New Copy Job
- Instead of an activity inside a pipeline, you can now create a Copy Job item. It supports full, batch and incremental copy
- Fast Copy in Dataflows Gen2 (GA)
- On-premises data gateway (GA)
- Fabric User Data Functions (private preview)
- You can create re-usable functions, which you can use e.g. in Notebooks and manage in the Functions hub
- Invoke remote pipeline
- You can now call ADF and Synapse pipelines from a Fabric data pipeline
- Session tag parameter to enable high-concurrency on Notebooks
- Using a session tag, you can use 1 spark session for multiple notebooks
Data Engineering
- T-SQL support in Notebooks
- You can also be connected to a warehouse
- Fabric Runtime 1.3, with Spark 3.5
Other
- Access Databricks Unity Catalog tables directly from OneLake
- A New DP-700 exam
- Focused at more in-depth data engineering tasks, coming in beta at the end of October
To get a full and detailed view of all the updates and changes have a look at these posts: (Add links to the blog posts)
