Two Takeaways from FabCon 2025
The 2025 Fabric Community conference has just concluded. There were many announcements but I found two of them intriguing to make a case for Fabric more compelling should a suitable project comes around:
- OneSecurity – Analysis Services Tabular and Power BI semantic models have long supported a comprehensive and flexible row-level security (RLS), such as to support scenarios requiring dynamically denying rows. Unfortunately, column-level security (aka object-level security) has been less flexible as I explain in more detail here. I hope OneSecurity will prove more flexible over time. Currently, it doesn’t support dynamic security, but I hope it eventually will, such as by allowing a SELECT statement to evaluate runtime conditions. So, keep an eye out for OneSecurity as it evolves over time if you face more complex column-level security requirements.
- Copilots for all F SKUs – Previously, I complained that Microsoft has established that AI must require premium pricing starting at $5,000/mo (F64 and above). But now they’ve promised that by the end of April copilots would go mainstream and available in all F SKUs should you need AI assistance.
Alas, no major announcements about Fabric Warehouse. As with Synapse, Microsoft went back to the drawing board with Fabric Warehouse. Consequently, the its T-SQL surface area doesn’t support various features I use. For example, IDENTITY and MERGE were promised long ago but unfortunately didn’t materialize. I personally don’t care for the most part about relational-like lakehouses or feature bundles. I don’t dare even dream about “advanced” features that SQL Server had for a long time, such as multiple databases, temporal tables, etc. Without robust warehousing, I still find it difficult to substantiate a good case for Fabric for most of my projects.
