The Microsoft Build 2025 conference has come and gone, bringing with it a wave of innovation aimed at empowering developers and data professionals alike. This year’s announcements highlight Microsoft’s continued investment in evolving the Fabric data platform, introducing a range of highly anticipated features and enhanced AI integrations.
With so much happening around the Fabric data platform, let’s look at some of the new features and capabilities that excite us the most.
Copilot integration across Power BI – A new era of data interaction
Microsoft has expanded Copilot’s role from simply generating reports to becoming a comprehensive, AI-powered data companion that helps with:
- Finding the right data – Copilot now has the capability to scan across your Power BI ecosystem—including reports, semantic models, and data agents—to efficiently surface the data most relevant to your needs.
- Seek Insights – Copilot is now able to retrieve the information from underlying data models and data agents. If the required measure, or summary doesn’t exist in the model, it will seek and build it for you. This enables users to get instant answers to ad-hoc business questions without waiting for report modifications.
- Prepping data for AI – To ensure your data is ready for AI-driven analysis, Power BI now includes three new features to help improve the accuracy, reliability, and relevance of Copilot’s insights:
- AI Data Schema: Structures your data for better AI understanding.
- Verified Answers: Ensures responses are based on trusted data.
- AI Instructions: Allows you to guide how Copilot interprets and responds.
GitHub Copilot: From code completion to agentic workflows
GitHub Copilot has already transformed the way we write code—so much so that over 15 million developers rely on it to build faster. But writing new code is just one part of the job. Developers also spend time designing systems, digging through documentation, debugging, refactoring, and managing legacy code.
That’s where agentic workflows with GitHub Copilot come in. These new capabilities help developers:
- Move faster from idea to production
- Boost code quality
- Accelerate collaboration
- Strengthen security
- Address technical debt
- Keep applications running smoothly in production
This evolution of Copilot is redefining the developer experience, making it more productive, intelligent, and resilient.
Beyond the general improvements to the Fabric data platform, there are several exciting new capabilities worth highlighting below.
Materialized Lake views (MLV) in Microsoft Fabric (Coming soon in preview)
- MLV’s are Continuously updated, persisted SQL views that simplify multi-stage data processing in a Lakehouse (e.g., bronze-silver-gold layers).
- These help to reduce complexity involved in building data pipelines and writing notebook code while ensuring data quality and improved performance.
- They are ideal for medallion architecture implementations.
Mirroring enhancements
- Real-Time Replication from SQL Server (2016–2025), Azure PostgreSQL, and Cosmos DB and cloud-hosted environments.
- Open mirroring (GA): Now publicly available with Parquet support for custom mirroring solutions.
- Private endpoint support: Azure SQL Managed Instances behind firewalls can now be mirrored securely using data gateways.
- Coming soon: Support for Oracle DB and Google BigQuery.
Enhanced security in Microsoft Fabric (Preview)
- Private Access with Azure Private Link – Microsoft Fabric now supports Azure Private Link for workspaces, allowing organizations to secure inbound traffic by routing it through private network paths. This ensures that access to specific Fabric workspaces remains isolated from the public internet, significantly reducing exposure and enhancing network security.
- Controlled outbound connectivity for Spark – With the introduction of outbound access protection for Spark (formerly known as data exfiltration protection), organizations can now enforce strict controls over which external endpoints Spark workloads can connect to. This helps prevent unauthorized data transfers and ensures that Spark jobs only interact with approved data sources, strengthening data governance and compliance.
- Encryption with customer-managed keys – Fabric now offers the ability to encrypt data using customer-managed keys (CMK) stored in Azure Key Vault. This gives organizations full control over their encryption strategy, allowing them to meet stringent regulatory and compliance requirements while maintaining ownership of their data protection mechanisms.
Copy Job – Now with Change Data Capture (CDC) support (Preview)
The new CDC support in Copy Job enables seamless, automated replication of changes (inserts, updates, deletes) from source to destination:
Key benefits:
- Zero manual intervention: Automatically captures incremental changes
- Automatic replication: Keeps destination data in sync
- Optimized performance: Processes only changed data, reducing load
How it works:
- CDC-based copy: For CDC-enabled tables, changes are captured and applied directly
- Watermark-based copy: For non-CDC tables, changes are detected via incremental columns
Supported connectors:
- Azure SQL DB
- On-premises SQL Server
- Azure SQL Managed Instance
(More coming soon!)
Other exciting updates
It’s not just the headline announcements that have us excited about the future—here are a few other noteworthy developments shaping what’s next for Fabric:
- Cosmos DB in Fabric: A NoSQL, AI-optimized database now available in preview.
- Fabric Spark: Native Execution Engine (NEE): A significantly faster engine, developed for Fabric Spark workloads, is now available.
- Warehouse Snapshots: Allows you to run queries against read-only views of data at specific points in time.
- Continuous Ingestion to Eventhouse: Automates extraction and loading from Azure storage and facilitates near real-time updates to Eventhouse KQL DB tables.
- Dataflow Gen2: Natural language to custom column – You can now simply describe the logic you need for your column, and Copilot will build it for you.
- SQL Server 2025 (preview): This new version has AI built-in, simplifying AI application development and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) patterns with secure, performant, and easy-to-use vector support, leveraging familiar T-SQL syntax. With this new capability, you can combine vectors with your SQL data for a hybrid AI vector search.
- Fabric CLI is now generally available.
Fabric Roadmap (Preview)
Finally, to make it easier for users to stay informed about upcoming features and ongoing developments, Microsoft has introduced the Fabric Roadmap (Preview). This centralized portal provides a transparent view into features currently in development, what’s rolling out soon, recently released capabilities as well as long-term plans for the Fabric platform.
Ready to take the next step and unlock the full potential of the Fabric platform? Reach out to our experts at info@invisocorp.com.
