State of Fabric: Houston - Outcomes for leaders. Patterns for builders. One decisive day.

Welcome comments, meet today's speakers, logistics

A C‑suite view of how Fabric creates measurable enterprise value in 6–12 months. We’ll cover where cost and complexity come out, how decision latency improves, and how to strengthen risk and governance. Includes a practical KPI lens for boards and leadership, investment prioritization, coexistence with current platforms, and proven ways to de‑risk adoption.

The practical starter path: reference architecture, Direct Lake adoption, semantic layer design, workspace standards, and the roles you need on day one. Covers coexistence with Databricks, Synapse, and existing warehouses, plus open formats and phased migration options.

Open Q&A on funding a pilot, governance from day one, security and lineage, change management, and how to align business and technical teams. Bring your use cases; we’ll focus on what’s achievable inside a quarter.

How to bring your existing SQL workloads into Fabric without moving or duplicating data. We’ll cover Fabric Mirroring for operational stores, OneLake Shortcuts to external data, and when to use each. Learn how to expose mirrored/shortcut data to T‑SQL, notebooks, and Power BI; align security (RBAC, sensitivity labels) and governance; understand freshness, latency, and performance trade‑offs; and see a demo that connects an existing SQL application, builds a governed semantic model, and delivers analytics in one place.

Speed up the path from raw data to trusted analytics. We’ll use Data Wrangler and notebooks to profile, cleanse, and reshape data directly in OneLake, compare when to use Dataflows Gen2 vs Wrangler, and publish clean datasets to lakehouse/warehouse for Direct Lake consumption. Topics include Delta optimizations, lineage capture with Purview, workspace standards, and how to hand off governed datasets to semantic models and Power BI for enterprise reporting.

Architect AI‑ready analytics by unifying data in OneLake with a trusted semantic layer. We’ll show patterns that ground and orchestrate agentic apps over Fabric (Direct Lake, notebooks, pipelines), integrate responsibly with Azure OpenAI/AI Foundry, and enforce governance with Purview. Includes reference architectures, common integration points with existing platforms, and a walkthrough from data to an AI‑assisted experience.

Bring your architecture questions. We’ll cover coexistence patterns, migration considerations, cost control, performance tuning, and organizational standards. If interest is high, we’ll split short breakouts on AI integration and real‑time analytics.