FabCon 2025 Day 1: Microsoft pushes Fabric’s reach, roadmap, and key alliances

MSDW Insight: The Fabric team showed the breadth of its ambition on day 1 of FabCon 2025, offering updates that AI enthusiasts and data warehouse experts alike could appreciate.

Agents built in Fabric will become more visible in Microsoft 365 Copilot, suggesting Fabric will have an increasing role to play in Microsoft’s AI story. 

At the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2025 day 1 keynote, presenters explained where Fabric data agents fit into the company’s broader AI vision, along with updates on data source mirroring, alliances, growth stats, and more

Data agents across AI scenarios

Fabric data agents can reason over and synthesize data in OneLake. And a public preview is launching that allows these agents to be used in Azure AI Agent Service by AI creators. 

In a demo at FabCon, Microsoft principal product manager Nellie Gustafsson demonstrated how a data agent can use multiple data sources, including semantic models, and can then be trained by the creator on the proper order or logic to use when interrogating the data. 

The creator can test and guide the agent with questions and instructions. And they can test the agent with even more complex queries to validate the quality of responses, which the agent reveals as it develops answers. Finally, Gustafsson noted that data agents support both row-level and table-level security rules, as well as OneLake security. Once published, a data agent can be made available from Copilot Studio or Azure AI Foundry. 

Database mirroring will expand to Dataverse, important on-prem sources

Database mirroring in Fabric will grow from its current options, including Azure SQL DB and Snowflake, which are already generally available, and public previews of Cosmos DB, Azure SQL MI, Azure Databricks Catalog, and Azure PostgreSQL. But Microsoft will also begin supporting other data sources soon. According to Microsoft Technical Fellow Amir Netz, in the coming months Microsoft plans to add support for SQL Server, SQL Server 2025 (which is still due for release in 2025), Oracle, and Dataverse. 

“Dataverse is going to be kind of … mirroring item in Fabric. We're working on that, and you will hear in the next few weeks more news about that,” he said.

OneLake and Snowflake find a way

Microsoft and one of its biggest data competitors, Snowflake, have announced a new way customers using both OneLake and Snowflake can work across their ecosystems while avoiding data import or export. Working with the Apache Iceberg project, the vendors have established a way for customers to access data from either system, according to Snowflake VP of product management Chris Child, who joined Netz on stage.