This week, on the official side:

• Pankaj Arora announces that Capacity Overview Events in Real-Time Hub are now generally available - monitor capacity conditions, trigger alerts and automate responses in near real-time.
• Freddie Santos on identity-based predicate filtering for SQL audit logs - cutting the noise in enterprise-scale auditing by focusing on the activity that actually matters.
• Misha Desai on data source routing in Microsoft Fabric data agents, now generally available - a two-stage orchestration process that matches natural language queries against source metadata, schema samples and example queries.
• Nevena Nikolic on 10 things to know about GPU-powered Query Acceleration in Fabric Data Warehouse (preview) - boosting analytical performance with GPUs, no SQL changes or hardware upgrades required, tackling CPU bottlenecks in large scans, joins, filters and aggregations.
• Anasheh Boisvert on monitoring Eventstreams with Workspace Monitoring (preview) - now with per-Eventstream control, capturing structured metrics and error data in dedicated KQL tables for real-time troubleshooting.

From the community:

• Wolfgang Strasser rounds up Fabric Runtime 2.0's move to general availability - if you haven't opted in yet, note the dates: Runtime 2.0 becomes the default in late September, and Runtime 1.3 moves to long-term support from 1 October.
• Aleksi Partanen explains Fabric's new Ontology feature as a "company brain" for AI agents - grounding agents in your organisation's real data model rather than raw tables.
• Pragati Jain goes beyond the basics on Row-Level Security and Purview Labeling - a proper governance layer for Fabric, not just ticking the RLS box.
• Kevin Chant lays out important Microsoft Fabric CI/CD decisions - why the choices you make early on simplify setup and save you complexity down the line.

Here are four upcoming events across the UK (two of them reminders from last time, in case you missed them):

• Wednesday 2 September, Birmingham - #PBIBRUM host Vlad Mihanta on Power BI Embedded, and Neil Rowlands on building a Power BI training programme.
• Tuesday 15 September, online - Devon & Cornwall Power BI on Semanticus, a VS Code workbench for testing and shipping semantic model changes, from Kane Snyder. They're also running a session on agentic BI development the following week (22 September) with Kurt Buhler.
• Reminder - Thursday 27 August, Salford - PBIMCR's Ghost in the Aether, a murder mystery built entirely on Microsoft Fabric, from David Mitchell and Adrian Critchley.
• Reminder - Tuesday 8 September, online - Devon & Cornwall Power BI on MCPs, Skills and Plugins, with Cristi Prifti.

This week, on the official side:

• Item Recovery becomes the default on 16 August. Yulia Turchin sets out what's changing: any tenant that has never explicitly configured Item Recovery will have it switched on with a three-day retention window, and new tenants will start with it enabled.
• Roberto Cervantes has started a series on event-driven Fabric, opening with how to choose the right event pillar - Business Events, Fabric Events and Azure Events overlap enough to be confusing, and this sets out what each one is actually for.
• Sidney Cirqueira walks through choosing your medallion pattern in Fabric Data Warehouse, and how you team's expertise should factor into the decision-making.

From the community:

• James Serra has written a great piece about when to use OneLake shortcuts, and when not to.
• Reza Rad demos Rayfin's Data App template, building a TypeScript frontend over a Power BI semantic model from a handful of AI prompts.
• Ginger Grant joined Aleksi Partanen to ask whether you really need GitHub Copilot for Fabric development after moving to Claude Code because of June's pricing changes..
• And we've been looking at how the Formula Engine and Storage Engine divide up the work behind a DAX query - useful background if you've ever inherited a model and need to work out why it's running so slowly.

New this issue: Community & Events. We're adding a standing section at the bottom of the newsletter listing upcoming Fabric and Power BI user group meetups, so you can see what's on. At the moment this is scoped to the UK, but if you are aware of a local group that you think should be included, please feel free to send through the meetup link!

Here are four upcoming events across the UK (most of them online!):

• Thursday 13 August, online - Microsoft Fabric UK host Edinson Medina of Microsoft on end-to-end CI/CD in Fabric: branching a feature workspace, environment-specific settings with parameter.yml, and merging up through environments.
• Thursday 20 August, online - Fabric & Power BI Wales hold their monthly session. The speaker hasn't been announced yet, so keep an eye on the listing.
• Thursday 27 August, Salford - PBIMCR present Ghost in the Aether, a murder mystery built on Microsoft Fabric, from David Mitchell and Adrian Critchley, followed by Craig Porteous on centralising versus federating your lakehouse. Hosted at Matillion.
• Tuesday 8 September, online - Devon & Cornwall Power BI on MCPs, Skills and Plugins.

This week, on the official side:

• The Fabric July 2026 Feature Summary rounds up everything from the month in one place - free DP-600/DP-700 certification vouchers via Data Days, FABCON and SQLCON in Barcelona this September, plus a batch of new deployment, governance, Spark, Eventstream, and Real-Time Intelligence capabilities.
• OneLake security improvements for SQL analytics endpoints - signed-in identities now pass straight through to OneLake, so RLS/CLS/OLS defined once applies everywhere, with better nested-group and service-principal support.
• And if you want to see who's been doing standout work across the ecosystem, check out this month's Fabric Influencers Spotlight, highlighting MVPs and Super Users across all corners of Fabric.

From the community:

• Nikola Ilic makes the case to stop physically materializing your silver layer now that GPU acceleration has landed for Fabric Data Warehouse - the logical separation still matters, the physical tables maybe don't.
• And Jason Cockington digs into the hidden cost of VertiPaq scans - two DAX measures can return identical results while taking very different paths through the engine.
• Alongside the OneLake security update above: Aleksi Partanen has a good reminder that workspace admins bypass OneLake Security roles entirely - contributor, member, and admin all see everything regardless of role, so don't assume RLS/CLS/OLS is airtight without checking who sits above viewer level in your workspace.

And finally, Reza Rad's Fabric Insider series has continued with Hasan Abo-Shally on Fabric MCP Servers, CLI & AI Agents - demos include a full Medallion architecture provisioned from a single pipeline run, and a Power BI report authored end-to-end inside one agentic conversation. And Wee Hyong Tok joined for Episode 9 to talk through where ETL is headed in Fabric - Gen2 Dataflows, DBT, SCD Type 2 automation, and the Fabric Data Factory MCP Server.

On the official side:

• Native Execution Engine now accelerating CSV workloads in Fabric Spark - up to 2x faster, and no code changes needed if it's already enabled.
• Fabric data agents in Microsoft Foundry get easier discovery and trust via MCP, OneLake Catalog, and multi-agent support.
• And, Forrester has named Microsoft a Leader in its Multimodel Data Platforms Wave.

From the community:

• Turning on Fabric's inbound network protection sounds like an easy win - Meagan Longoria explains why you might want to think twice!
• Vojtěch Šíma provides a deep dive on Direct Lake internals.
• Is Azure Data Factory going away? Aleksi Partanen put the question straight to Microsoft PM Mark Kromer. Short answer: no, but the new stuff is landing in Fabric Data Factory first.
• And, James Serra refreshed his guide to Power BI performance in 2026.

On the official side:

• The headline is GPU-accelerated query execution for Fabric Data Warehouse - an informal-but-rigorous TPC-H benchmark showing roughly 6x the throughput at 1000 concurrent users versus CPU execution, with p95 latency dropping from 97 seconds to 15.
• Also worth a look: role-based access control for API for GraphQL lands in preview, with field- and row-level security baked into the API itself rather than a custom app layer.
• OneLake picked up a genuinely money-saving GA feature: lifecycle management with storage tiers, which automatically moves cold data into cheaper cool/cold tiers based on access patterns without you lifting a finger.
• And Fabric Data Factory pipelines got a batch of new capabilities, headlined by an AI-powered Operations Agent (preview) that watches pipeline health and suggests fixes, plus activity-level monitoring so you can drill straight from a failed run into the specific step that broke.

Two bigger stories worth their own mention this issue: Reza Rad sat down with Yitzhak Kesselman (CVP for Real-Time Intelligence at Microsoft Fabric) for a expansive conversation on where Fabric IQ and Real-Time Intelligence are heading - ontologies, ops agents, and the "no AI without RTI" argument, with real customer numbers to back it up. And Rayfin, aka Fabric Apps - Microsoft's new open-source SDK for building full-stack web apps entirely inside a Fabric workspace - TypeScript frontend, Fabric SQL database or Power BI semantic model backend, all under one governed roof.

In the community:

• Erwin de Kreuk's FMD framework can now generate column-level lineage from Fabric Lakehouses straight into Microsoft Purview.
• And a deep, honest write-up on getting governed Databricks data into Fabric behind a fully private network compares four setups and lands on the same conclusion every time: the hard part isn't moving the data, it's carrying the Unity Catalog policies with it.
• And Chris Webb finally sets out the actual benefits of Direct Lake mode beyond "it's the new shiny thing" - cheaper refresh, no memory limits, and reuse of the same OneLake tables across multiple semantic models.

And, over on the endjin blog: a blog from yours truly which compares star schema, flat table, and header/detail designs in DAX Studio.

On the official side: the headline is the Fabric data agent API going public - the data agent SDK now runs on the Fabric REST API instead of being stuck inside a notebook, so you can create, configure, and publish data agents from your own CI/CD pipelines, internal tools, or backend services. Big news for anyone provisioning the same agent shape across dozens of workspaces.

Also worth a look: Delegated OneLake Shortcuts hit preview, letting a shortcut route access through a service principal instead of every consumer's own identity- This solves both the "central team can't scale permissions" problem and cross-tenant sharing. And Item Recovery is now GA, so "I accidentally deleted the wrong lakehouse" is a recoverable mistake!

Over in the community: Reza Rad shows how pairing GitHub Copilot with Microsoft's open-source Fabric Skills library turns "list every empty workspace in my tenant" from a manual job into a single prompt.

Bart Wullems shows how Fabric's Copy job now builds Slowly Changing Dimension Type 2 for you with zero merge statements - provided your source/destination pair is currently supported. And on the reporting side, Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari debug a running-total measure that quietly broke because of sort-by-column settings, fixing it properly by packaging REMOVEFILTERS into a reusable user-defined function instead of patching the one measure.

Last but not least, Kevin Chant shows how Managed DevOps Pools can get your Fabric deployment pipelines into a firewall-protected Key Vault without the usual self-hosted-agent headache.

On the official side:

The headline is Fabric Data Agents now supporting Microsoft Entra ID service principal authentication - one of the most requested capabilities for moving data agents from prototype to production, and the start of a short video series if you want to follow the setup step by step.

Also worth a look: Event-Driven Copy Job Execution with Fabric Activator is now GA, letting you trigger Copy jobs straight from an Activator rule with no pipeline in between, and there's a new Fabric Spark Operations Skill (Preview) that turns "why did my notebook fail at 3am" into a single natural-language prompt instead of a multi-tab log hunt.

Microsoft is also bringing Power Query connectors fully in-house with a clearer Preview-to-Retirement lifecycle.

And Build 2026 brought a long list of announcements covered in James Serra's roundup: Agent Skills for Power BI is the one most likely to change how you build reports, while Rayfin - the new open-source SDK that lets coding agents define and deploy a full governed app backend straight onto Fabric - might be the one that changes what counts as a Fabric workload at all.

Over in the community:

Roman Lánský dug into why your mirrored "real-time" reports might quietly be serving stale data, and what the new SQL endpoint metadata sync does about it.

Nikola has written the definitive (and very long) guide to variable libraries, the Fabric item that exists specifically so "Test is reading Prod" becomes a story you only tell at conferences.

John Kerski makes the case that DAX User Defined Functions are the biggest thing to happen to semantic model testing since PBIP, and has the downloads on his PQL.Assert library to back it up.

Meagan Longoria offers a sensible crawl-walk-run framework for agentic Power BI development if you'd rather not hand an AI agent the keys all at once

And, Adam Marczak argues it's time to stop treating Azure itself as the platform and pick Fabric or Databricks as the actual center instead.

Thanks for being here for issue #1 - tell a friend, tell your whole workspace...