Cool New Things in Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric never stands still! This month saw FabCon (Microsoft Fabric Community Conference) 2026 and there was a good deal of buzz around some new announcements. You can read the official take on the new developments in the Microsoft Fabric platform here

But there’s always some hype around these things so we’ve asked our chief data strategy consultant Ian Roberts for his analysis. Ian is always keeping an eye on the latest developments and playing with new tools and features.

Ian says there were four major platform announcements:

• Fabric Database Hub

• Fabric IQ & Semantic Modelling

• Fabric Data Agents (GA)

• Fabric Runtime 2.0 (Preview)

There were also announcements about data connectivity updates and developer & Governance tools.

But what are the really cool new things in Fabric that could dramatically change things for your business or organisation?

Here are Ian’s top 4 cool features that have come into Fabric in the last 6 to 12 months:

• Mirroring & Shortcuts improved support – now including SharePoint shortcuts – avoiding the need to move data

• Lakehouse materialized views – avoid the need to build complex orchestration and eliminate the need for days of data engineering effort

• Translytical Workflows & User defined functions – store code in a function for read/write operations and attach to buttons in Power BI reports

• Enterprise Networking & Security Support

These four features help drive simpler solutions, central security and governance, improved end-to-end security and connectivity, central business logic and reusable code, faster development, lower costs and faster access to insights.

If you would like to know more about the powerful single platform that is Microsoft Fabric then be sure to save the date May 14^th for our webinar – Microsoft Fabric – Up to Date Essentials. You can contact us here while we are getting ready for you.