Recap FabCon Europe 2025 Vienna

From 15 to 18 September 2025, the Austria Center Vienna hosted the European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference (FabCon Europe 2025), the largest European event dedicated to Microsoft Fabric, data analytics and artificial intelligence.
More than 4,200 professionals attended over 130 technical sessions and 10 full-day workshops, consolidating FabCon as the main meeting point for the community.

In addition to technical sessions, FabCon featured unique activities such as the Data Viz World Championship, the Fabric Racing Experience with real-time analysis powered by Forza Motorsport, celebrations for Power BI’s 10th anniversary, and multiple networking opportunities with experts and the community.

1. OneLake as a unified foundation

OneLake was the star of the event. The preview of mirroring for Oracle and Google BigQuery was announced, enabling near real-time access to these data sources without the need for complex copy processes. Shortcuts to Azure Blob Storage also reached general availability, together with new automatic transformations that convert JSON and Parquet files into Delta tables ready for analysis.

Integration with Azure AI Search reached general availability, making it easier for custom agents to be grounded on corporate data stored in OneLake. In addition, the OneLake catalogue introduced two new tabs, Secure and Govern, to strengthen security and governance, while the new Table API (in preview) allows queries over tables in Iceberg or Delta formats using Fabric’s security model. This is complemented by advanced diagnostics per workspace and the expansion of data agents to work directly with mirrored databases.

2. Graph and Maps: context for AI

One of the most anticipated announcements was the arrival of Graph in Fabric, in preview from October 2025. It will allow organisations to model and query complex relationships between customers, partners or supply chains, offering a new level of context for agents and AI applications. Alongside this came Maps in Fabric, which combines streaming analytics and geospatial capabilities to enable real-time, location-based decision making. The aim is for AI not only to rely on structured data, but also on relationships and location, enabling richer and more accurate scenarios.

3. Developer experience

The developer community also received major updates. The Fabric Extensibility Toolkit, in preview, is the evolution of the Workload Development Kit and allows the creation of applications and artefacts in Fabric more efficiently and with greater automation. The new Model Context Protocol (MCP), also in preview, integrates with VS Code and GitHub Codespaces to enable assisted code generation and orchestration of items via public APIs and preconfigured templates.

Continuous deployment (CI/CD) has been expanded to lakehouses, warehouses, Power BI reports and data agents, while User Defined Functions and the official VS Code extension have reached general availability. Finally, a new multitasking interface was introduced with horizontal tabs, support for multiple active workspaces, and an improved object explorer.

4. Security, migration and performance

In terms of security and performance, Fabric strengthened its position as an enterprise-ready platform. Azure Private Link and outbound protection for Spark are now generally available, while IP filtering at the workspace level is in preview. From October, customers will also be able to manage their own encryption keys (Customer Managed Keys).

Surge Protection was also introduced, generally available for background processes and in preview for workspaces, allowing organisations to control unexpected consumption spikes. For Data Warehouse, Microsoft highlighted that since August 2024, 40 improvements have been released, resulting in a 36% increase in performance on standard benchmarks. And for those still working with Synapse, an end-to-end migration experience is now available, moving both data and metadata with intelligent assistance and full support.

5. Community and success stories

Beyond the technical announcements, FabCon Vienna was also a showcase of the community’s value. The pre-conference workshops, all sold out, allowed administrators, engineers and data scientists to experience first-hand how to apply Fabric in real scenarios. During the sessions, very practical improvements were highlighted, such as new functions in Data Warehousing (from collation management to UDFs and MERGE) or monitoring tricks that attendees identified as directly applicable to their daily work.

The networking atmosphere was another strong point: hallway conversations and spontaneous meetings in the community lounge helped solve real problems in minutes, with notebooks, experiences and best practices being shared openly. In addition, the Data Viz World Championship and the Power Hour provided a more creative and relaxed break, reinforcing the feeling of belonging to a growing community.

6. Partners and integration

Finally, the integration ecosystem was reinforced. Native workloads from ESRI, Lumel and Neo4j were announced, extending Fabric’s capabilities in geospatial analytics, business intelligence and graph analytics. Progress was also made in the integration with Snowflake, which now supports bidirectional read and write in OneLake with full Apache Iceberg support, consolidating interoperability between the two platforms and expanding options for clients working in hybrid environments.

FabCon Europe 2025 confirmed that Microsoft Fabric has moved from being a vision to becoming a mature, production-ready platform. Strong governance in OneLake, advanced analytics with Power BI, Graph and Maps, enhanced developer tools and enterprise-grade security were the key highlights. All of this was accompanied by the energy of a community that continues to grow every year, making Vienna an unforgettable milestone.

Next stop: Fabric Day

The learning doesn’t end in Vienna. At Plain Concepts, we invite you to join us at Fabric Day: The Power of Data in the Age of AI, an event where we’ll explore how to apply the latest Microsoft Fabric innovations in your organisation, together with experts from Microsoft, Databricks and SEK International Schools.

This is a unique opportunity to dive into real-world cases, discover best practices and understand how to unlock the full potential of your data in this new AI-driven era.