Ignite 2025: Fabric IQ and Fabric Databases open a new data frontier

With the opening of Ignite 2025, Microsoft placed significant emphasis on its Fabric portfolio as an important part of an organization's AI toolkit. Arun Ulag, president for Azure Data, reported that since it launched two years ago, Fabric has seen the most significant revenue growth of any analytics platform in Microsoft's history. 

Today, over 28,000 customers use Fabric, Arun and other Microsoft officials have reported this week.

Microsoft bills Fabric as “a unified, open, and extensible platform” to centralize the steps of data projects. At the event, the company announced a new workload: Fabric IQ. 

“The power of IQ lies in how it unifies disparate data types under a single, coherent framework. Built upon PowerBI’s industry-leading, rich semantic model technology, IQ brings together analytical data, time-series telemetry, and geospatial information, all organized under a semantic framework of business entities and their relationships, properties, rules, and actions,” Ulag explained. 

Customers can create operational agents, a new type of agent in Fabric, as a way to model virtual team members. Operational agents are able to monitor data real-time, spot patterns, and take proactive measures. It is more flexible in the ways it can consume data, compared with the rigidity of tables and schemas. 

In conjunction with the event, Microsoft launched Fabric Databases, making Cosmos DB and SQL database both generally available for Fabric. A preview of the new HorizonDB, a managed PostgreSQL-compatible database service, is coming soon. 

Fabric Databases are intended to improve app development, supporting granular configuration, cloud authentication, and customer-managed keys. With Fabric Databases, Microsoft hopes customers will be able to combine analytical, transactional, and operational data within a developer-focused platform. 

“Fabric databases offer serverless, autonomous architecture, enterprise-grade security, and native AI integration, including support for vector data and RAG patterns, making it the launchpad for modern, data-driven innovation. Developers can query live operational data from SQL database or Cosmos DB without complex ETL or duplicated pipelines, while OneLake keeps the data analytics-ready and in sync for a consistent, real-time view across workloads,” stated Microsoft team member Shireesh Thota.

“Unified security across the platform ensures your operational workloads are protected with enterprise-grade standards, while unified billing simplifies cost management at global scale.”