Microsoft is unveiling a variety of enhancements across Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databases that help organizations put their data estate at the heart of a successful AI strategy.
Fabric IQ brings governed business context into Copilot, grounding experiences in the Power BI semantic models, metrics, relationships and business definitions organizations already trust, according to Microsoft.
With Fabric IQ in Microsoft Copilot Chat and Cowork now generally available, users can ask business questions and receive answers grounded in governed Power BI data, while Cowork can use those insights as part of broader multistep work.
For Fabric and Power BI customers, this capability is on by default in Copilot Chat and Cowork and extends the semantic foundation they already have into Microsoft Copilot while preserving existing access controls and governance.
IQ Sharing in Fabric, now in preview as part of Fabric IQ, breaks down company boundaries by enabling organizations to securely share data and the business context that gives it meaning, while maintaining governance over the underlying assets. Starting with key Fabric IQ artifacts and context, IQ Share is designed to evolve beyond preview to help customers discover, share, and activate trusted context wherever it’s needed, Microsoft said.
Together with OneLake mirroring and shortcuts, these investments create a more open foundation for sharing governed data and context across organizations, platforms and ecosystems.
Observability in Fabric helps teams move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive operations. Cross-workspace monitoring and an enhanced Monitor Hub provide a unified view across jobs, capacities, workspaces and workloads, while Operations Agents and Activator help teams investigate issues, identify root causes with AI, and automate responses.
Fabric Apps brings application development directly to governed data in Microsoft Fabric, helping organizations build and scale AI-powered business applications faster, Microsoft said.
With new capabilities for data connectivity, transactional workloads, backend logic, storage, and policy-controlled access, developers can move from prototype to production on a unified data foundation. These experiences bring application creation closer to where enterprise data and insights already live, helping more people turn data into action.
Now generally available, SQL Server on Azure Local brings SQL Server and Azure services into local environments, giving organizations more choice to run workloads closer to their applications and operations. SQL Server on Azure Local with disconnected operations, now in preview, extends that flexibility to environments where cloud connectivity is interrupted, restricted, or unavailable.
These options give organizations operating across regulated, local, edge and disconnected environments greater choice over where their critical data and workloads reside and operate, said Microsoft.
Building on its introduction at FabCon Atlanta, Database Hub in Fabric is now in public preview. It provides a central control plane for managing SQL Server, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB and SQL databases in Fabric, helping administrators monitor and govern their database estate.
Complementing this management experience, specialist database agents for SQL and PostgreSQL in Database Hub in Fabric and Visual Studio Code, coming soon to public preview, help teams investigate issues, understand performance bottlenecks, and identify optimization opportunities within their development environment.
Together, these capabilities help teams understand their database estate and make more informed operational decisions.
For more information about this news, visit www.microsoft.com.