Eight of us are at FabCon Europe this week. Here is what we are listening for.

Eight of the Hopton team are at FabCon Europe in Barcelona this week. The brief is simple: bring back what is real, and leave the rest on the stage.

Eight of the Hopton team are at the European Microsoft Fabric + SQL Community Conference (FabCon Europe) in Barcelona, from 28 September to 1 October 2026. We are there to separate what is ready to use from what is still roadmap, across five areas: Fabric IQ and data agents, Database Hub, Real-Time Intelligence, OneLake shortcuts, and governance.

Why nearly half the company is in Barcelona

Eight people out for four days is a big investment for a business our size. We have made it on purpose.

The Microsoft data platform is changing faster than at any point I can remember. Something new lands every month. Some of it changes how we should build for clients. Plenty of it is roadmap presented as release. Our job is to know the difference before a client asks, not after.

Last year's event in Vienna brought together more than 4,000 data professionals, and Barcelona is expected to be bigger, with more than 130 sessions and hands-on tutorials. So this is a full-on learning week, and the brief for our eight is simple: bring back what is real.

What we are listening for

Fabric IQ and data agents. Everyone wants agents. An agent is only as good as the definitions it reasons over. If the business cannot agree what "margin" means, an agent just gets it wrong faster. The semantic work underneath is the part I care about, and it is the same point we made in context is the bottleneck, not the model.

Database Hub. Microsoft announced it in Atlanta in March as one place to manage Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, PostgreSQL and Fabric databases. For clients running a mix of operational databases alongside their analytics, that could remove a lot of friction. We want to know how much of it works today, and how much is still a slide.

Real-Time Intelligence. Live telemetry is moving from a nice demo to something operations teams actually run on. We want the patterns that hold up once they leave the stage, the ones that survive real data volumes and a real support rota.

OneLake shortcuts. Most of the businesses we work with do not run everything on one platform, and they are not going to rip it out. How well Fabric works with what they already have matters more to them than any new feature. We compared the main options in Fabric, Databricks and Snowflake, and we want to see where that picture has moved.

Governance and security. The unglamorous one. It is also the one that decides whether anything else gets past a pilot.

What does not change

None of this is the point on its own. We said it in fund the outcome, not the platform: a board does not buy a lakehouse, it buys decisions it can make faster and a number it can trust.

That is why the rest of our blog this week stays close to the ground. On Wednesday we write about taking a monthly reporting pack from day seven to day two. On Friday it is turning site telemetry into a number the board trusts. Neither is glamorous. Both matter more to the businesses we work with than most of what will be announced on stage.

My view going in has not changed. How clever the tech is was never what decides whether data gets used. It is whether people trust the number enough to act on it. AI does not fix that. It makes it matter more.

What happens next

We will share what we bring back, in the same spirit as what is worth adopting from a Power BI release, and what to ignore: the features worth acting on now, the ones to watch, and the ones to leave alone for a while.

If you are weighing up where Fabric fits in your own estate, talk to our Microsoft Fabric team or start with a free analytics audit.

Bring back what is real. Leave the rest on the stage.