This was a great in-person event in a venue that couldn't have been more perfect - the first ever Fabric Community Conference in Vegas! We were able to connect a little differently being in-person for the week, so while we only had a few of us attend the ice cream social on Monday night, I was able to connect with a dozen other registered attendees in hallway chats and in sessions throughout the remainder of the week.
Big topics centered around - you guessed it - Fabric and OneLake. With ETL rapidly becoming a thing of the past, the old world worries about managing two sets of similar or identical data are gone (or hopefully getting there). Fabric's ability to mirror and shortcut to data in extraneous locations is mesmerizing and questions arose specifically with Dataverse about how the tenant storage increase is measured and precisely what it entails. Is it a straight percentage indicator? Is it an index that is created on Dataverse for the endpoint? If so, is it additional storage consumed for those environments that already have TDS endpoint activated?
We also chatted about - you guessed it again - Copilot! It's definitely getting easier and more interesting, and people are starting to dream up ideas that stretch far beyond the simplicity of a chatbot, but the Dataverse stewards out there are showing signs of additional stress from it since AI is only as good as the data that it has access to for the LLMs. Data quality management and usage monitoring were top of mind once the stigma of analytics faded away, so by the end of the week, there was a timely and ever so appropriate push of information around Purview and what we will see come next from that team. While the Dataverse team is committed to the integration of Purview and is already releasing some functionality of it, it will be great if the MS team can reinvest in that integration to make overall Dataverse data stewardship more centralized, robust, and easy. Carrier pigeons have been sent to Redmond...!
