What a way to kick start a new role! Last week I started as Technology Director at Analytics Masterminds. I also spent most of the same week at Fabric February in Oslo.
This was a great opportunity for me to get some front-line insights into what people are coming up against in Fabric, and catch up with friends from Microsoft and across the data community, particularly thinking about how these shape the way I can meet customers where they are to support their Fabric journey.
Having attended Fabric February every year since 2024, this year I noticed a distinct change in both the sessions and conversations throughout the day. There is a distinct move away from the “How do I get started..” and “What tool can I use to do X…” conversations to deeper questions around solving engineering or analytics problems, scaling implementations, and how to make things more efficient.
To echo that shift, my colleague, and Managing Director of Analytics Mastermind, Linda Torrång delivered a session to a packed cinema on “Fabric Performance Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them”. The whole event was sold out at just over 700 people.
There has been a lot of noise on social media recently about Microsoft Fabric’s failings or missing features and as a Microsoft MVP, I’m not held back from agreeing with them but conversations, sessions, and questions at Fabric February tell me that whilst there are frustrations, Fabric is enabling so many organisations to get insights from their data and quickly too. One of the things I love about Fabric is the ability to get going so easily and get actionable data without a lot of deep technical overhead that many organisations simply cannot support. The challenge, which is true to most platform choices, is navigating the gaps, getting the most out of what you build, and focusing on business outcomes – not which product is the shiniest.
If you’re asking similar questions of Fabric, get in touch and explore our Fabric Health Check – it helps you align what you’ve currently got to best practices and avoid those performance pitfalls.
Check out fabricfebruary.com for the full agenda from this years event, including some materials from sessions if you didn’t catch all the details on the day.
