Microsoft announces new data capabilities across Fabric and Azure Databases

Organizations must combine powerful AI models with their own unique business data and context to build lasting advantage, Microsoft announced. Speaking at the European Microsoft Fabric + SQL Community Conference in Barcelona, Microsoft detailed new data capabilities across Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databases designed to ground artificial intelligence in proprietary enterprise knowledge.

Fabric IQ Brings Governed Business Context to Microsoft Copilot

Fabric IQ brings governed business context directly into Microsoft Copilot, grounding user experiences in Power BI semantic models, metrics, relationships, and business definitions that organizations already trust. Microsoft reported that Fabric IQ is generally available today in Microsoft Copilot Chat and Cowork, allowing users to ask business questions and receive answers tied to validated Power BI data.

Integration with the new Code experience is rolling out through the Frontier program. For Power BI customers, this capability is active by default in Copilot Chat and Cowork, preserving existing access controls and governance while extending semantic foundations into Copilot.

IQ Sharing Enables Cross-Organizational Collaboration

To help companies collaborate beyond internal team boundaries, Microsoft introduced IQ Sharing in Fabric, which is currently available in preview as part of Fabric IQ. The feature allows organizations to securely share data and business context with customers, partners, and broader ecosystems while keeping strict governance over underlying assets.

The company noted that IQ Sharing builds on OneLake mirroring and shortcuts to establish an open foundation for sharing governed data and context across different organizations, platforms, and ecosystems.

Observability and Application Development in Microsoft Fabric

As enterprises scale their unified data platforms, Observability in Microsoft Fabric provides cross-workspace monitoring and an enhanced Monitor Hub to deliver a unified view across jobs, capacities, workspaces, and workloads. Operations Agents and Activator help teams investigate issues, identify root causes using AI, and automate responses to move from reactive troubleshooting to proactive operations.

Additionally, Microsoft launched Fabric Apps to bring application development directly to governed data within the platform. Developers can utilize new data connectivity, transactional workloads, backend logic, storage, and policy-controlled access to move applications from prototype to production faster.

Agentic Data Engineering and Azure Databases Updates

New agentic data engineering features in Fabric bring autonomous execution to complex data engineering workflows. Engineers define expected outcomes and operational boundaries, allowing agents to plan, execute, validate, and refine data preparation tasks while staying within those defined limits.

In database management, SQL Server on Azure Local is now generally available, bringing SQL Server and Azure services into local environments. A preview of SQL Server on Azure Local with disconnected operations extends this flexibility to restricted or offline environments. Meanwhile, the Database Hub in Fabric is in public preview, offering a central control plane to manage SQL Server, Azure SQL, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB, and SQL databases in Fabric, with specialist database agents coming soon to public preview in Fabric and Visual Studio Code.