Microsoft Fabric Archives - Purple Frog Systems

FabCon Europe 2026: News from Barcelona!
October 6^th, 2026 in Blog, Community, Fabric, Microsoft Fabric
Last week me and the team were in Barcelona for FabCon Europe, alongside nearly 5,000 other data professionals. This year’s keynote had a clear message: Fabric is now the context for AI Microsoft’s pitch focused on Microsoft IQ (Work, Foundry, Web and Fabric IQ). Fabric IQ is the bit we care about. OneLake data, semantic model measures, ontologies and real-time signals, combined into something agents can reason over. Data flows in…
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One Week to Go Until FabFest 2026!
October 6^th, 2026 in Community, Microsoft Fabric
It’s nearly time! Next week, October 15, FabFest 2026 arrives at Millennium Point in Birmingham, bringing together the Microsoft data community for a full day of Microsoft Fabric and AI. Hosted by Purple Frog’s Joe Billingham, Lewis Prince and Hollie Whittles, FabFest is all about bringing the community together to learn, share ideas and hear practical insights from people working with the technology every day. And there are now just a…
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Purple Frog heads to FabCon Europe in Barcelona
September 30^th, 2026 in Community, Microsoft Fabric, News
It’s been a busy week for the frogs in Barcelona, with members of the Purple Frog team heading to FabCon Europe for a few days dedicated to Microsoft Fabric, data and AI. FabCon brings together the Microsoft Fabric community, from Microsoft experts and industry speakers to partners and data professionals, providing an opportunity to hear about the latest developments across the platform and see how organisations are putting the technology into…
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SQL Server vs Fabric Warehouse: T-SQL gotchas nobody warns you about
July 23^rd, 2026 in Blog, Data Warehouse, Fabric, Microsoft Fabric, SQL, SQL Server
Fabric Warehouse looks just like SQL Server. It uses T-SQL, has schemas, stored procs and more. Yet, you migrate your first proper workload and see “that’s not supported” errors you never had to think about before. Fabric Warehouse isn’t SQL Server. Under the bonnet it’s storing everything as Delta Parquet in OneLake, and that storage format shapes what T-SQL can and can’t do. Here’s what actually trips…
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Fabric Workspace Monitoring: What It Actually Shows You
July 17^th, 2026 in Blog, Fabric, Microsoft Fabric
Fabric Workspace Monitoring: What It Actually Shows You Ever had a Fabric pipeline hang for no obvious reason, or watched a semantic model refresh crawl with no explanation? Fabric Workspace Monitoring is built for exactly that. Flip one toggle in workspace settings and Fabric spins up a read only Eventhouse, streaming execution logs, query text, CPU consumption, and error data into KQL tables you can query directly. Nothing to install, no…
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Power BI Large Semantic Model Storage Format: Do You Need It?
June 15^th, 2026 in Blog, Microsoft Fabric, Power BI
If you’ve spent time in a Power BI semantic model’s settings, you’ve probably noticed the Large semantic model storage format toggle. Most people leave it off because they’re not entirely sure what it does or whether they actually need it. This blogpost breaks down what large semantic model storage format is, what it requires and the practical implications for your environment, so you can make an informed decision rather…
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Baking Up Better Data: Microsoft Fabric and the Fabric Toolbox
May 8^th, 2026 in Blog, Community, Data Factory, Data Warehouse, Fabric, Microsoft Fabric
Recently, I presented a talk at the Birmingham Data User Group, titled “Stop Hand-Whisking Your Data: Faster Fabric Development with the fabric-toolbox”. On the back of that, I wanted to summarise the talk into a blog and share how you can use fabric-toolbox to enhance your Fabric development. Data engineering can feel abstract. Layers upon layers of transformation, movement, and logic that are hard to visualise at a glance. So, when talking…
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What is Microsoft IQ?
March 27^th, 2026 in AI, Blog, Fabric, IQ, Microsoft Fabric
Enterprise AI is only as good as the context behind it. Microsoft IQ is the intelligence layer designed to give AI agents, and the people who rely on them, the business context they need to deliver genuinely useful, trustworthy answers and actions. Built across the Microsoft cloud stack, Microsoft IQ draws from three complementary sources: productivity signals, institutional knowledge, and live business data. Together, they form a shared,…
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Microsoft Fabric FabCon 2026 announcements that will transform your data stack
March 25^th, 2026 in Blog, Community, Microsoft Fabric, News, Power BI
What Microsoft just revealed about the future of enterprise analytics… Microsoft’s FabCon 2026 conference unveiled a transformative vision for enterprise data and AI integration. Rather than incremental improvements to existing tools, the announcements represent a fundamental architectural shift. Fabric is evolving from a passive data platform into an active intelligence layer that drives real-time, autonomous decision-making across…
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Fabric Toolbox: A Helpful Resource for Exploring Fabric
March 5^th, 2026 in Blog, Community, Fabric, Microsoft Fabric
As Microsoft Fabric adoption grows, many businesses are starting to move beyond experimentation and into building production analytics platforms. However, implementing and managing a modern data platform still involves more than simply enabling the technology. To help teams get started and explore best practices, Microsoft and the wider community have introduced Fabric Toolbox, a collection of open source resources designed to support Microsoft…
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Alex Whittles (MVP)
Annabel Hemingbrough
Callum Bryant
Hollie Whittles
James Snow
Jeet Kainth
Joe Billingham
Jon Fletcher
Laura Adamson
Lewis Prince (MVP)
Matt Mair-Durrant
Nick Edwards
Tom Owen