There’s nothing quite like a room full of people who love data as much as you do. We can’t wait to reconnect with this community in Barcelona. The European Microsoft Fabric + SQL Community Conference (FabCon and SQLCon Europe) returns September 28-October 1, 2026, at the Centre de Convencions Internacional de Barcelona. After a year of incredible innovation across Microsoft Fabric and SQL, this conference is shaping up to be something special. We have a lot to share—and even more to learn from each other.
Following our record-breaking gathering of more than 4,000 data professionals in Vienna last year, FabCon Europe is back and bigger—with 130+ expert-led sessions, 100+ speakers, and 10+ hands-on tutorials spanning the entire Fabric and SQL ecosystem. And once again, FabCon and SQLCon are co-located, so a single registration gives you access to the best of Fabric and SQL training, all under one roof.
From hands-on technical sessions to customer-led stories, there’s something for every data professional, presented by our Microsoft team and partners alike.
To help you plan your week, I’m sharing a few of my top picks across the tracks I’m most excited about this year.
AI, data agents, and Fabric IQ
AI is at the heart of everything we’re building, and these sessions show what it looks like to put intelligent agents to work on your own enterprise data. At Microsoft Build 2026, we announced the general availability of Fabric IQ—these sessions are a great opportunity to see it in action.
- Build the next generation of intelligent data agents in Microsoft Fabric—Misha Desai, Avrilia Floratou. Join this deep dive into next-generation agent capabilities, including support for unstructured data, graph reasoning, and the latest NL2SQL innovations. If you want to understand where intelligent data agents are headed, start here.
- Fabric IQ End-to-End: The Complete Enterprise AI Platform—Chafia Aouissi, Yael Schuster-Davidi. Fabric IQ creates a unified, governed foundation for enterprise AI agents. This end-to-end walkthrough shows how the pieces fit together so agents can answer more complex questions with confidence.
- From Insight to Action – Translytical Taskflows and AI in Microsoft Fabric—Nadim Abou-Khalil. See how to close the loop between analytics and action, combining real-time workflows and AI-powered automation, so insights don’t just inform decisions—they help trigger them.
- Fabric IQ + Foundry: The Semantic Backbone of Enterprise AI Agents—Hugo Barona. Learn how semantic grounding improves agent reasoning and reduces hallucinations, and why a strong semantic layer is the backbone of trusted enterprise AI.
- Building Enterprise AI Agents on Microsoft Fabric: Architecture, Security and Production Lessons—Leon Gordon. A real-world blueprint for deploying enterprise-grade AI agents in regulated environments—covering the architecture, security, and hard-won production lessons you’ll want before you ship.
Real-time intelligence
When your data is moving, your insights should be too. These sessions bring Fabric Real-Time Intelligence to life with live telemetry, streaming pipelines, and operational use cases.
- From Real-time Data to Custom machine learning-driven Insights—Sónia Cruz, Rita Sousa. Turn streaming data into intelligent decision-making with custom machine learning models and see how Fabric helps you move from raw events to predictions in real time.
- Every turn you take, every move you make – Agents operating on real-time ship movements—Frank Geisler, Sander van de Velde. One of the most engaging real-world sessions on the agenda: see operational intelligence in action as agents reason over live ship-movement telemetry and automate decisions in real time.
- Turning Database Changes into Real-Time Intelligence with Fabric Eventstreams—Arindam Chatterjee, Xu Jiang. Learn how to convert OLTP changes into real-time, AI-ready workloads using Eventstreams—without requiring complex pipelines.
Data engineering, lakehouse, and integration
The foundation matters. These sessions are full of practical, production-tested patterns for modernizing your estate and orchestrating workloads at scale.
- From Legacy to Fabric: Migrating a 10-Year Data Warehouse Without Lift-and-Shift—Florian Pujol, Lydia Helle. A practical playbook for modernizing a legacy data platform thoughtfully—without simply lifting and shifting legacy challenges into a new environment.
- Choosing the Right Data Integration Approach in Microsoft Fabric—Gaston Cruz, Javier Villegas. Pipelines, shortcuts, Spark, or warehouses? Walk away with a clear decision framework for choosing the right integration approach for each scenario.
- From Chaos to Control: Orchestrating Lakehouse Workloads in Microsoft Fabric—Ásgeir Gunnarsson. Real-world orchestration patterns to bring order to production lakehouse environments and keep your workloads running predictably.
- Zero-Copy, Multi-Cloud Fabric: OneLake Shortcuts + Mirroring as the Fast Track to AI and Real-Time—Terry Russell. Discover modern architecture patterns that unify multi-cloud data with OneLake shortcuts and mirroring—your fast track to AI and real-time scenarios without duplicating data across systems.
Data warehousing and Fabric SQL
For the T-SQL developers and data warehouse professionals, these sessions cover what’s new, how to unify your estate, and how to keep everything running smoothly at scale.
- What’s New in Fabric Data Warehouse for T-SQL Developers—Jovan Popovic, Salil Kanade. Get the latest developer capabilities for building modern analytics with the SQL skills you already have.
- It’s Not Either–Or: Building an Intelligent Data Estate with Fabric Data Warehouse and Fabric SQL—Matthias Nohl. Learn how to unify transactional and analytical workloads into a single, AI-ready architecture—without trade-offs.
- Monitoring Fabric Data Warehouse at Scale—Sam Debruyn. Practical tools and techniques for optimizing warehouse performance and reliability when operating at scale.
SQL databases
SQL continues to evolve for the era of AI, and these sessions show how it’s becoming more intelligent, faster, and more capable than ever.
- Azure SQL Hyperscale: The Cloud Database for the era of AI—Bob Ward, Borko Novakovic. Hear why Hyperscale is becoming the default choice for modern cloud databases, and what that means for your AI-ready applications.
- Vector Search in SQL Server 2025 – Basics and Beyond—Ben Weissman. Bring AI-powered semantic search directly into SQL, from foundational concepts to advanced techniques.
- Mastering Performance for Microsoft SQL with AI—Erin Stellato, Anna Hoffman. See how AI is accelerating troubleshooting and performance tuning, helping you identify and resolve issues faster than ever.
- Azure SQL or Fabric SQL: Deploying Infrastructure and Databases as Code—Rob Sewell, Jess Pomfret. Learn how to automate database and infrastructure deployment using CI/CD pipelines, enabling version‑controlled, repeatable, production-ready workflows without manual configuration.
Governance and security
Trusted data is the foundation for trusted AI. These sessions cover how to govern, protect, and secure your estate end-to-end.
- OneLake security: deep dive and what’s new—Aaron Merrill, Cristian Petculescu. Go inside how unified security works across every Fabric workload, and get the latest on what’s new.
- Securing Your Data Estate with Purview—Marthe Moengen. An end-to-end approach to governance, compliance, and data protection across your Fabric estate.
Don’t miss FabCon TV
Can’t get enough behind-the-scenes energy? FabCon TV continues on YouTube, with new episodes filmed in Atlanta rolling out each week—featuring insights, previews, and voices from across the community. It’s a great way to get into the FabCon spirit before you arrive in Barcelona.
Connect with the community that’s building the future
One of my favorite parts of every FabCon is watching this community come together—Microsoft product teams, MVPs, partners, practitioners, and first-time attendees, all working towards a shared goal: solving real-world challenges and helping each other learn and grow. Whether you’re deep in a hands-on session, swapping ideas in a hallway conversation, or connecting at a networking event, FabCon is where your ideas turn into reality.
With so much new innovation across Fabric and SQL to share—and so much to learn from each other—this year’s event is one you won’t want to miss.
Explore the FabCon Europe 2026 programme and start building your agenda. We can’t wait to see you in Barcelona!
Kim Manis is the Corporate Vice President of Product, Microsoft Fabric. Before her time on the Fabric team, Kim lead Product Management for Power BI as well as worked on all sorts of products ranging from productivity software, social networks, and online retail.
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