Day 1 Keynote from FabCon Europe 2025 (with chapters, timestamps & summaries)

Will Needham

🚀

4d (edited) • General

Hey everyone! Microsoft just released the Day One Keynote Recording from FabCon Vienna!

I used AI to get some useful timestamps/ chapters and summary notes:

Chapter 1: Opening & Vision for Fabric

0:00 – 1:14

Intro video with music and narration.
Themes: Every organization has data, but being AI-ready requires more than just data—it requires integration, governance, and scalability.
Welcome to FabCon 2025.
Introduction of Arun Ulag (Corporate VP, Azure Data).

Chapter 2: Arun Ulag’s Welcome & Context

1:14 – 2:27

Over 4,100 attendees: customers, partners, community members.
FabCon Europe now Microsoft’s largest European conference.
Hundreds of Microsoft engineers, architects, and designers present to engage directly.
Hundreds of customers and partners sharing their Fabric journeys.
Transition to Satya Nadella’s video message.

Chapter 3: Satya Nadella’s Message

2:27 – 4:07

Data is the foundation of AI.
Fabric = complete data and analytics platform:
Fastest-growing database product in Microsoft history.
25,000+ customers (London Stock Exchange, Siemens, Lumen, etc.).
Microsoft itself runs on Fabric (“customer zero”).
Announcements:
Closing: “We’re just getting started.”

Chapter 4: The Need for Data Unification

4:13 – 7:13

AI is only as good as the data feeding it.
Traditional database categories (SQL, NoSQL, lakehouses, vector DBs, etc.) are blurring.
Customers don’t want to integrate 18 different products → demand for unification.
Fabric:
Microsoft leads across 4 Gartner Magic Quadrants (data integration, cloud DB, AI, BI).
Fabric launched 22 months ago → 25,000+ customers, 80% of Fortune 500.
50% of customers use 3+ workloads (Data Factory, SQL/Spark, Power BI).

Chapter 5: Customer Story – Siemens

8:07 – 12:59

Guest: Christian Meyer, Head of Platforms at Siemens

Challenge: fragmented tools → need harmonization.
Solution: Siemens “Data in the iCloud” = global data mesh.
Benefits:
Obstacles:
Future: scaling real-time intelligence, bringing AI closer to data with copilots/agents.

Chapter 6: Customer Story – KPN

13:12 – 16:33

Guest: Heis, Chief Data & AI Officer at KPN

Challenge: fragmented, siloed data.
Needed: unified scalable data exchange platform.
Technology selection:
Microsoft partnership: close co-development with product teams.
Future goals:
Advice: Data is a strategic asset for AI—tools + employee mindset unlock value.

Chapter 7: Partners & Ecosystem Momentum

16:44 – 23:41

Partners are key to Fabric’s success (ISVs, SIs, consultants).
ISV Highlights:
Partner momentum:
Community growth:
Community video shown with testimonials.

Chapter 8: Product Announcements – Developer Experience

26:01 – 31:03

Speaker: Amir Netz (CTO of Fabric)

Keynote split into 3 parts: platform, One Lake, business value.
Developer-first focus:
Full CI/CD coverage:

Chapter 9: Demos – Developer Productivity with Eren

31:03 – 36:42

New notebook experience: Power Query-style connections in Lakehouse.
Multitasking tabs → IDE-like environment.
Color-coded workspaces for clarity.
Variable libraries for parameterized shortcuts.
Improved deployment pipelines & workspace management.

Chapter 10: Spark & Data Engineering

37:14 – 41:16

Spark momentum: 15,000 customers, 300,000 notebooks created weekly.
47% performance improvement in the past year.
Migration success: Norwegian developer AOS migrated 600 notebooks, 87 lakehouses.
Announcements:

Chapter 11: Data Warehousing

41:16 – 42:26

Heavy investments in modern MPP warehousing.
40 performance improvements → 36% faster in 6 months.
6× growth in adoption in past year.
New Warehouse Migration Assistant GA → AI-assisted, UX-friendly migrations.

Chapter 12: Graph Capabilities in Fabric

42:33 – 49:14

Guest: Tessa

Native graph capabilities built into Fabric.
Built by the same team that developed LinkedIn’s social graph.
Features:
Demo: building a marketing campaign graph (linking people, posts, tags, products).

Chapter 13: Real-Time Intelligence

49:45 – 53:42

46% of Fabric customers already using it (6× usage growth in a year).
Customer story: Iceland Foods (retail) → uses real-time intelligence for store operations.
Scale:
Announcements:

Chapter 14: Databases & Translytical Approach

53:52 – 1:00:38

Fabric adds SQL & NoSQL databases (Cosmos DB) with SaaS simplicity.
Study shows databases in Fabric improve:
Coming soon: GA for Fabric databases.
Concept: “Translytical” = blending transactional + analytical in one platform.
Demo with Patrick & Amir:

Chapter 15: OneLake & Data Factory Momentum

1:00:44 – 1:08:30

Transition from databases (pillar 1) → Pillar 2: OneLake.
OneLake = “OneDrive for data”: unified storage, always open format.
Massive scale:
Data Factory adoption:
Dataflow Gen2 announcements:

Chapter 16: Shortcuts & Mirroring

1:08:39 – 1:18:14

Mirroring + shortcuts = easier ingestion without heavy ETL.
Customer story: James Hall mirrored 0.5B rows → cut latency from hours to minutes.
New sources:
Shortcut enhancements:
New OneLake Table API:
Demo: Joining BigQuery + Oracle + S3 emails (with AI sentiment) into OneLake, shared seamlessly with Snowflake.
Diagnostics & security:
Stats: 30M+ catalog users across 230,000 orgs (Excel, Teams, Fabric, etc.).

Chapter 17: Security & Governance Announcements

1:18:24 – 1:19:09

Security moving from tenant level → workspace level.
New features:
More details promised in Day 2 keynote (Kim’s session).

Chapter 18: Power BI – 10 Years of Growth

1:19:09 – 1:21:20

Transition to Pillar 3: Delivering business value.
Power BI adoption:
Power BI turns 10 years old.
Community reflections video: career transformations, friendships, user groups.
Semantic models = heart of Power BI (critical for AI to reason over business data).

Chapter 19: Web Modeling in Power BI

1:22:03 – 1:27:17

Announcement: Web Modeling GA (full parity with Desktop).
Available to Mac users for the first time.
Features:
Demo: Weather + sales dataset modeled directly in web → report built in browser on Mac.

Chapter 20: Copilot in Power BI Apps

1:27:17 – 1:31:30

1/3 of Power BI users only consume via Apps.
Announcement: Copilot in Power BI Apps (Public Preview).
Features:
Demo: Zava sales app → summary, Austria filter, sentiment deep dive, search for reports.

Chapter 21: Maps in Fabric

1:31:48 – 1:37:35