FabCon Europe 2026: the Fabric updates that really matter

In late September, around 5.000 data professionals gathered in Barcelona for FabCon Europe, combined with SQLCon this year. More than 130 sessions, an impressively long list of announcements, and one message Microsoft repeated throughout: the data foundation you build in Microsoft Fabric now feeds directly into Copilot and agents.

The list is too long to cover in full, and not everything is equally relevant to every organization. We reviewed it with one question in mind: what will change for the people who will be back at work on Monday, dealing with their semantic models, pipelines, and capacity? Here is our selection.

The common thread: your semantic model is now your AI interface

In our view, the biggest announcement is not a single feature, but the overall direction. Fabric IQ is now generally available (GA, Generally Available) in Microsoft Copilot Chat and Cowork, rather than only in preview. Users can ask business questions there, with answers based on your existing Power BI reports and semantic models. With no additional cost for AI tokens. This aligns exactly with a development we wrote about earlier: your semantic layer is becoming the API for AI.

The Fabric IQ MCP server and Fabric data agents in Copilot Studio are also GA, including visualizations in data agents. Ontologies, semantic views, and the ability to bring DAX measures into ontologies will follow in preview.

IQ sharing is also coming in preview. It lets you share not only governed data, but also business context such as agent instructions and ontologies with other teams, partners, and ecosystems. Support for Fabric IQ ontologies and Power BI semantic models is on the roadmap. This increasingly turns semantic context within Microsoft Fabric into something you can reuse and share, rather than something confined to a single workspace or application.

Sounds good. But it also means every messy model will suddenly reach a much wider audience. That measure called “Measure 3,” the column without a description, the relationship only the original developer understood: Copilot will work with them just as readily as it does with your best-documented model. An AI assistant is only as good as the model it relies on.

For everyone who has spent years emphasizing naming conventions and documentation: this is your moment. Enjoy it 😉

Governance: finally, control over what Copilot can see

Good news, because with the previous point in mind, this is exactly what you need. Microsoft is introducing two layers of control:

• Restrict from Copilot: administrators decide which semantic models can participate in AI experiences at all.
• A setting for each semantic model that enables or disables read-only access through Power BI Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, Cowork, data agents, and remote MCP servers.

Note that the second setting is enabled by default. Users with existing read access can therefore use the model through supported Copilot and MCP experiences unless you explicitly restrict it.

Sensitivity labels, DLP policies, and information protection now also carry over to Copilot. With DLP restrict access, Purview can limit access to a Fabric item as soon as sensitive data is detected. Also new are the Govern experience in the OneLake catalog, outbound access protection for OneLake shortcuts, and, in preview, Policies in Fabric with attribute-based controls.

Capacity: more flexibility, but read the fine print

Capacity overage is GA. When your capacity is full, you automatically purchase additional compute instead of being throttled. Useful, but the price is three times the pay-as-you-go rate, with a configurable rolling 24-hour overage limit in CU-hours. It is enabled by default for newly created capacities. So check which threshold is configured in your environment before the first invoice does it for you. We include settings like these as standard in our Fabric management.

Workspace-level surge protection is now available in preview and is being rolled out further. It lets you isolate a runaway workspace while keeping business-critical workspaces unaffected. This addresses a problem we regularly encounter in practice, where a single experimental notebook drags down reporting across the entire organization.

At the other end of the spectrum, the F0 SKU with on-demand billing is coming: no prepaid compute, with charges per CU-hour without smoothing and a rolling 24-hour limit. This could be useful for small environments and development work. But pricing has not yet been announced, so I would not overhaul your capacity strategy just yet. For those looking to move in the opposite direction, F4096 and F8192 are now available as well.

Fabric Apps in Power BI

Fabric apps in Power BI will enter preview for Power BI Pro and Premium Per User over the coming weeks, with up to 1 GB of Fabric Database per app at no additional cost. In Power BI Desktop, you will soon be able to have a Fabric app built from a semantic model by describing what you want in natural language, then view, modify, and publish it.

We are curious to see how this holds up in practice. The barrier to building something will be much lower, which is exactly why it makes sense to decide in advance who is allowed to publish what. Otherwise, a year from now, you may have fifty Fabric apps and no one will know who manages them.

For data engineers

Less in the spotlight, but perhaps the most useful category for day-to-day work:

• Copy job now supports change data capture and audit columns. SCD Type 2 is now generally available. That saves a lot of custom-written boilerplate.
• Mirroring for Google BigQuery and SharePoint Lists is GA. Dynamics 365 Business Central and a bidirectional connection to Salesforce Data Cloud 360 will follow in preview.
• Git and CI/CD: compare and commit, selective branching, and bulk import/export APIs are GA. Deployment plans and file-level commits are coming to preview.
• Warehouse: custom SQL pools are GA. GPU-accelerated query execution and a node-based billing model (pricing is not yet known) are in preview.
• The data engineering agent (Project Osmos), now in preview, assists with migrations, schema harmonization, and ETL on Fabric Spark, and can be controlled from tools including GitHub Copilot, VS Code, and Claude Code.
• Observability: unified workspace monitoring, an updated Monitor Hub, job alerts through Activator, and an operations agent that is the first to investigate pipeline failures.

Migrating from Azure Data Factory or Synapse

Still using ADF or Synapse? View in Fabric brings your existing environment into a Fabric workspace while ADF remains the source of truth. A new assessment tool shows how ready each pipeline is for migration. And the Migration Assistant now supports Teradata in preview.

That is a sensible approach: first see what you have, then move it.

Planning, Copilot, and database updates

• A Native Planning Engine is in preview, with Microsoft claiming up to 10x better performance and scalability. I am curious to see how that holds up in a real-world environment. Planners can also use their own identity to work with semantic models through Fabric IQ.
• Microsoft 365 Copilot in Power BI is in preview, disabled by default, and separate from the existing Power BI Copilot setting.
• On the SQL side: DiskANN vector indexes, SQL Server on Azure Local, a Database Hub in Fabric (public preview) providing a single overview of Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, and SQL database in Fabric, plus database agents that analyze performance issues.
• Microsoft reiterated its support for Apache Ossie, an open standard for exchanging semantic metadata. A small update, but a good sign.
  
  

What we recommend

1. Get your semantic models in order. Use clear names and descriptions, certified measures, and a sound security model. And make a deliberate decision for each model about whether it should be available to Copilot, rather than letting the default setting decide.
2. Check your capacity overage setting. It is enabled by default, at three times the standard rate.
3. Start collecting your capacity metrics now. Once pricing for F0 and on-demand is available, you’ll want to compare using real figures rather than a gut feeling.
4. Run the assessment on your ADF or Synapse environment, even if migration is not yet on the roadmap. At least then you’ll know where you stand.

Want to discuss what this means for your environment? Let us know; we’d be happy to help you think it through.