The headline news at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference keynote was that Microsoft have lifted the restriction on using Copilot, so you no longer need an F64 to use this. Anyone now with an F2 or above can use Copilot in Fabric. This can be used alongside the recently launched Fabric Copilot Capacities, enabling you to offload Copilot activity to a dedicated Copilot capacity to prevent it impacting jobs on priority capacities.
The preview of OneLake security was announced introducing new capabilities to allow granular security definitions like row and column level security directly in OneLake. Fabric engines like Spark, SQL Endpoint and Power BI Direct Lake mode will now follow the same security rules rather than additional rules defined in each engine. It does this by creating roles in OneLake to grant access to data and defines the tables and/or folders each role can access. It can then restrict tables further using row or column level security.
New CI/CD enhancements were previewed. The Variable library item type provides a unified way to manage configurations across different environments, reducing the need for hardcoded values and simplifying your CI/CD processes. Variables can be defined at the workspace level and used across workspace items such as data pipelines, notebooks and lakehouse shortcuts. In addition Service Principal support was introduced for GitHub.
Fabric User Data Functions is a serverless platform that gives app developers and data engineers the ability to easily write and run applications on Fabric. They enable you to implement custom logic wherever you need to in your Fabric ecosystem by leveraging native integrations with Fabric data sources, Fabric Notebooks and Data pipelines. You can use these functions to perform tasks such as data validation or data cleaning, create integrations with external systems, or create re-usable function libraries.
The preview of the Fabric Command Line Interface (CLI) was announced enabling you to manage your Fabric environment from the command line and simplifying scripts (compared to when using the REST APIs directly).
Autoscale Billing for Spark in Microsoft Fabric was also introduced offering greater flexibility and cost efficiency for Spark workloads. When enabled Spark workloads will no longer directly consume the Fabric capacity this billing option is enabled on. Instead they will run alongside your existing capacity (F2 or higher) and be billed on a pay-as-you-go basis in a serverless fashion, similarly to how billing for Spark works in Azure Synapse. This doesn’t replace the existing Fabric capacity model but rather complements it, giving more options and control over how compute resources for Spark workloads are allocated.
A full list of all the announcements can be found here:
All the Published Blogs from FabCon
Fabric March 2025 Feature Summary
We were also treated to a sneak peek of Materialized Views for Spark and the lakehouse, enabling you to streamline the building of your medallion architecture from Bronze to Gold. These are pre-computed views that allow you to create constraints and can be leveraged across the entire Fabric stack. One of the most powerful features is the ability to define data quality rules, such as dropping rows that don’t satisfy the constraint.
These views just look like regular delta tables in your lakehouse and are available to query via the SQL Analytics endpoint and PowerBI direct lake.
We also saw a demo of the auto-generated materialized view management dashboard, allowing you to quickly drill down to view any errors in the build steps and a consolidated Power BI report showing the issues you are hitting and aggregated metrics.
You can see a great demo of this feature here: Materialized Views – Quick Tips
In conclusion, I would highly recommend attending FabCon in future either in the US or Europe (the next one is in Vienna between 15th-18th September). Personally, it was great to connect with members of the Microsoft product group and the wider Fabric community. It was also a fantastic experience to present a session at FabCon, the first time I’ve spoken at a conference outside the UK!