Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog

What’s new in OneLake and the Fabric platform: more sources, security, and capacity tooling

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Organizations today are under immense pressure to unify data spread across clouds, systems, and formats—while also meeting higher standards for security, governance, and AI readiness. Microsoft Fabric was built to solve exactly this challenge. Since launching two years ago, more than 28,000 customers like Dentsu, Eastman, and Apollo Hospitals have adopted Fabric to bring their data together in OneLake and run analytics, AI, and operational workloads on a single, open platform. At Ignite, we’re expanding that foundation with a broad set of innovations that make it even easier to unify your data estate and keep it governed, protected, and ready for AI.

In this blog post, I’ll highlight the new zero-ETL, zero-copy sources in OneLake, deeper interoperability between OneLake and Microsoft Foundry, and new tools to help admins manage capacity, security, and governance at scale. Together, these updates further cement Fabric as the ideal data platform for your mission-critical workloads—open, integrated, secure, and built to connect every part of your data estate to the intelligence your business needs.

What I’m covering here is only part of the story. For a deeper look at our new workload called Fabric IQ, new bidirectional interoperability with SAP and Salesforce, the general availability of Fabric Databases, and several other major announcements, I encourage you to read the Azure Data announcement blog from Arun Ulag, President of Azure Data.

Unify your entire data estate with Microsoft OneLake

With Microsoft OneLake, you can access your entire multi-cloud and on-premises data estate through a single, unified data lake that spans your organization. Once connected, your data is centrally managed through the OneLake catalog—a unified layer for access, governance, security, and discovery. Today, the OneLake catalog is trusted by more than 230,000 organizations worldwide, including 95% of the Fortune 500, and is seamlessly accessible from familiar tools like Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Teams.

Now, we’re introducing new capabilities that make it even easier to bring all your data into OneLake, connect it to intelligent agents, and manage it with stronger governance and security.

New mirroring and shortcuts sources for SAP, Microsoft 365, and Azure Databases

We’re excited to introduce new ways to unify your data in OneLake with a zero-ETL approach. Mirroring for PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, and SQL Server versions 2016-2022 and 2025, are now generally available. We are also announcing the preview of Mirroring for SAP, powered by SAP Datasphere, which enables seamless data replication from SAP systems into OneLake. This is in addition to our announcement of bidirectional integration with SAP BDC. Whether you’ve adopted SAP BDC or not, you can now access your SAP data in OneLake. We’re also bringing Iceberg support in Snowflake mirroring into general availability. By mirroring these sources, you can eliminate the need for ETL processes and get Delta tables optimized for analytics. Try these mirroring sources today or learn more in the Data Integration Blog.

We are also announcing the preview of shortcuts to SharePoint and OneDrive, allowing you to bring your unstructured, productivity data into OneLake without copying files or building custom ETL flows. You can use these unstructured files to train agents or to provide relevant context alongside your structured data. And, as business users make changes to their spreadsheets, documents, and PDFs in SharePoint and OneDrive, the files in OneLake always remain up to date. Try these shortcuts today.

Connect your multi-cloud data estate to agents with Foundry IQ

Today, Microsoft announced Foundry IQ by Azure AI Search: the next generation of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Agents rely on context— Foundry IQ’s knowledge bases deliver high-value context to agents by simplifying access to multiple data sources and making connections across information. You can use the OneLake knowledge source in Foundry IQ to connect agents to multi-cloud sources like AWS S3, on-premises sources, and structured and unstructured data across your data estate—all without creating copies or introducing data sprawl. With knowledge bases in Foundry IQ, your AI developers can build agents that are grounded in curated, governed data from Microsoft 365 Work IQ, Fabric IQ, and the web for more accurate app responses and informed decision-making. Try the Foundry IQ knowledge base today.

Take a look at how you can use shortcuts and mirroring to bring all your data sources together in OneLake and use it to power the next generation of intelligent agents in Foundry:

Enhancing governance for admins and data security in the OneLake catalog

Over the last year, we’ve expanded the OneLake catalog to become the central place to discover, manage, govern, and secure your data in Fabric. Today, we are expanding its capabilities even further.

We are also upgrading the OneLake catalog Govern tab with a new preview experience designed for admins. From a centralized dashboard, Fabric admins can now view out-of-the-box insights on domain and capacity inventory, workspace operations, protection status, and curation. They can dive deeper with detailed Power BI reports, take recommended actions to quickly resolve issues, or even chat with Copilot to better understand the insights—all in one place. We are also expanding Copilot’s capabilities to automatically generate summaries for semantic models with a single click, providing quick insights and improving your exploration and decision making.

We are also releasing new ReadWrite permissions for OneLake security, allowing teams to configure folder-level write access within lakehouses so contributors can write data without needing full contributor or higher roles in the workspace. Learn how to start using OneLake security.

Together, all of these enhancements make OneLake not just a data lake, but a strategic control plane for enterprise data—curated, connected, and ready for AI. Whether you’re building agents, dashboards, or operational workflows, OneLake helps ensure your data is always where you need it, when you need it, and in the format that drives action.

Confidently deploy and manage the Fabric platform with new network security features and capacity management tools

As you scale your data operations with Fabric, reliability and security are non-negotiable. With that in mind, we are announcing new capabilities designed to help you maintain uninterrupted performance during peak demand and uncompromising protection for sensitive data.

Expanded network security controls for your Fabric workloads

On the security front, Outbound Access Protection—which allows you to restrict outbound connections to only approved endpoints—is being extended to cover dataflows, data pipelines, and OneLake shortcuts, in addition to the recently announced coverage for Fabric data warehouses and SQL Analytics Endpoints. While these extensions will be in preview in early 2026, OAP support for Spark and SQL Analytics Endpoints is already generally available. Coming soon, we are also releasing Tenant API for OAP, allowing tenant admins the ability to see the workspaces which have OAP enabled.

We also recently released Customer-Managed Keys into general availability, empowering organizations to encrypt their data using their own keys. Now we are extending Customer Managed Keys to support keys stored in Azure Key Vaults deployed behind a firewall and use in SQL Databases in Fabric, now in preview.

New Fabric capacity tools to help you optimize costs and avoid throttling

To help you gain control over the jobs running on your Fabric capacities, we are expanding surge protection and introducing a new tool called Fabric capacity overage—both of which will be released into preview in Q1 2026—and adding Fabric capacity events in the Real-Time hub. First, surge protection will now let you set limits on specific workspace activity to protect your capacities from unexpected surges from non-critical workspaces.

We are also releasing Fabric capacity overage which admins can turn on for specific capacities, allowing them to automatically pay for excess consumption and avoid throttling whenever high-traffic periods occur. Rather than over-provisioning for rare spikes, you can right-size your capacity for typical usage and enable overage only when needed. Admins can even set a 24-hour limit so you don’t break your budget, and the feature can be toggled on or off in seconds. These tools are designed to work together to help you prevent over-use and maintain smooth, uninterrupted operations even during peak demand.

Finally, we’re excited to announce we are adding Fabric capacity events in the Real-Time hub. It’s a highly requested feature now in preview that provides the ability to analyze capacity events in real-time and respond appropriately. Fabric capacity events will provide real-time data for two event types: Capacity Summary (smoothed metrics every 30 seconds) and Capacity State (instant updates on changes like pauses or throttling).

See more Microsoft Fabric innovation

At Ignite, we announced several transformative enhancements to Microsoft Fabric that will help organizations unify their data estates and power the next generation of AI apps and agents. We’re introducing the preview of Fabric IQ, a new workload in Fabric that unifies your data with operational systems under a semantic model of business entities and their relationships—providing a live, connected view of the enterprise. We are announcing the general availability of SQL and Cosmos databases in Fabric, giving developers world-class database engines that provision in seconds—and deliver a simple, autonomous, secure, and AI-optimized foundation for modern applications.

We are also expanding interoperability with SAP, Salesforce, Azure Databricks, and Snowflake to enable bi-directional, zero-copy data sharing between their platforms and Fabric. Finally, we are weaving AI into the places you work every day with enhancements to Fabric data agents, Copilot in Power BI, and Fabric operations agents. To dive deeper into these milestone innovations, read the Azure Data announcement blog from Arun Ulag, President of Azure Data.

You can also learn more about everything else we are bringing to Fabric by reading the Fabric November 2025 Feature summary blog, the Power BI November feature summary blog, or by exploring the latest blogs on the Fabric Updates channel.

Join us at FabCon Atlanta

Looking for a dedicated event on Microsoft Fabric? Join us at the 3^rd annual Fabric Community Conference this year in Atlanta, Georgia from March 16-20, 2026, for even more in-depth sessions, cutting-edge demos and announcements, community networking, and everything else you love about FabCon. And we are ecstatic that SQLCon 2026 is now officially part of the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, bringing together two powerhouse communities in SQL and Fabric.

You can Register today for either event or get full access to both. And use code MSCATL for a $200 discount on top of current Early Access pricing!

Challenge yourself and get certified in Microsoft Fabric

Unify your data, unlock real-time insights, and kickstart your journey to becoming a certified Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer—join the DP-600 Skills Challenge today.

Build smarter pipelines, unify your data estate, and take the next step toward DP-700 certification—start the Microsoft Fabric Data Engineer Skills Challenge today.