Fabric February in a Cold Oslo!
It’s time for another Fabric adventure with Wortell – Smart. And yes… time for snaecks! 😄
Together with Ruben Kamphorst and Sven Strandstra, we kicked off our trip on Wednesday, February 4th, smooth travels, no delays, no chaos. By lunchtime we touched down in a very chilly Oslo (around –5°C). We knew instantly the moment the plane door opened… brrr.
First stop: lunch. Thanks to Valerie Junk, we joined Alexander Arvidsson, Reitse Eskens and Laura de Bruin. We ended up having a great conversation about public speaking, challenges, opportunities, and, most importantly, the universal truth: nobody knows everything about Fabric (seriously, you can’t know it all).
After lunch, we headed to our apartment to drop off our stuff. In the afternoon we explored the beautiful city of Oslo. Even though it was freezing, the city was absolutely worth the walk. From the Opera House, to Akershus Festning, and into the city center, we saw it all. And of course, squeezed in some work between sightseeing: texting colleagues, answering emails, and discussing our goals and ambitions.
With fingers nearly frozen off, it was time for a warm drink. After that heading for dinner! We initially aimed for Mamma Pizza, but the 30+ minute waiting line made the decision easy. We switched to a Thai restaurant, no queue, great food, win-win.
We wrapped up the evening with a few drinks back at the apartment… because tomorrow is the main event, and we need to be in top shape!
The Day of Fabric February
After a solid night’s sleep, we hopped on the metro and arrived around 08:15 at the Fabric February venue. Because we were perfectly on time (for once!), we scored some of the best seats in the IMAX cinema, those big, relaxed luxury chairs. Not a bad way to start the day!
Around 08:45, the show kicked off. The four powergirls, Marthe, Emily, Wilde and Catherine, opened the event in a fun, energetic, and sparkling way that immediately set the tone.
Then it was time for the keynote delivered by Devang Shah, Patrick LeBlanc, Benni de Jagere, and Lars Anderson, packed with highlights and live demos.
One of the coolest new features they presented was the Operations Agents. They help describe context, connect to an ontology model, and even send alerts straight into Teams, with suggested actions included. Very cool stuff.
Another upcoming feature is capacity overage billing, which works outside the Capacity Metrics App. It’s designed to prevent throttling by letting you temporarily burst above your capacity, if you enable and accept the overage, of course. Handy when you need extra horsepower at the right moment.
After the keynote, it was time to dive into a series of sessions and soak up even more Fabric goodness.
Between all these sessions, it was time for drinks and snaecks! And since the event was hosted in a cinema, there was absolutely no shortage of them. From popcorn to donuts and candy, basically everything you’re not supposed to eat before lunchtime, but hey… conference rules don’t count, right?
The first session I joined was about batch vs. real‑time data loading in a medallion architecture.
In just 45 minutes, it was great to see two completely different solutions for the exact same data, and compare how they behave.
The batch solution loads data via a copy job into a Lakehouse, which acts as the Bronze layer. On top of that, Materialized Lake Views (MLV’s) are built in a notebook forming the Silver layer, refreshing every minute. A semantic model on top serves as the Gold layer, polished and shiny.
The real‑time solution uses a notebook connected to a SQL Server instance with an Azure Event Hub library, pulling in data through a JSON payload to create an event stream. This notebook loads data into an Eventhouse table acting as the Bronze layer.
From there, several alter table policies generate new Silver tables automatically. On top of that, a KQL query aggregates everything, and the evaluation is pinned directly to a dashboard, making this the real‑time Gold layer.
Fast, shiny, and just a little magical.
After this session it was time to head to the next one and visit the master himself from Guy in a Cube: Patrick LeBlanc. His session was all about the new MCP server and how you can use it to automatically generate a full semantic model with relationships, documentation, and basically everything except coffee.
What is the MCP Server?
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) server is a backend service that uses AI to help you build and document your semantic models. Think of it as a supercharged assistant that can create model objects, build relationships, write descriptions and documentation,
and suggest structure based on your data.
Patrick demonstrated how fast you can model with the MCP server. Really fast. But of course the golden rule applies:
Don’t blindly trust AI. Always check, verify, and double-check before you run anything against production.
And the highlight?
By the end of the demo, the MCP server had generated an 18-page documentation file for the semantic model.
Eighteen pages.
Absolutely bananas!
Then it was time to grab some lunch and explore the community area. One of the best things about an event like this is the community vibe and the great people you meet along the way.
In the community area there was Data Crush, organized by Ben Weissman and supported by Emilie Rønning. Nothing beats the energy of such a simple but hilariously fun activity. And honestly, grabbing the high score and beating Emilie was absolutely fantastic. A rematch next year is already guaranteed!
After lunch it was time to move on. This time I chose to follow the session of Marc Lelijveld and Iqbal Khan about extending Fabric monitoring. Marc showed how you can take the standard monitoring setup to the next level. You can pull data from the admin monitoring workspace and build a composite model on top of the admin capacity metrics semantic model. Once you have access to that data, you can shape and update the model exactly the way you want.
Even better, you can store more than thirty days of history, since the standard capacity metrics app only keeps thirty days. So not only do you gain more flexibility, but you also unlock more long‑term insights. Pretty neat.
Next stop, it was time to visit our very own Wortell Power BI master, Valerie Junk, for her session on Tables and Matrix visuals. The room was absolutely packed with more than a hundred attendees. Wow. If that does not prove how popular her session was, nothing will. And honestly, she deserved it.
Her session was full of simple but incredibly effective tips. Those classic Power BI tricks that look almost too easy, yet instantly make your reports cleaner, clearer and more business friendly. The kind of tips let you think, why have I not been doing this all along.
The most important message was to always think about your audience. Who is looking at the data. Align your headers, create breathing room with whitespace, and suddenly everything looks more professional. It is like tidying up your room, but for visuals.
After the session I treated myself to some more snaecks and had a great conversation with Erwin de Kreuk. Always nice to catch up again!
The last session of the day for me was the legendary Fabric Lightning Bingo. A brilliant combination of bingo, unexpected tech topics, fun facts and, best of all, presenters desperately trying to explain things they absolutely did not prepare for. Alexander and Valerie did an amazing job, but wow, it looked incredibly difficult. I am pretty sure I will keep dreaming about “Vector Embeddings” for the next few nights. The energy in the room was fantastic and there was a lot of laughter from start to finish.
Since I had bingo, I also won the Nerdycorn Lego set. Now I only need to find a moment to actually build it.
We ended this glorious snaecks‑filled Fabric February day with some drinks, met a few other attendees, demolished a massive pizza and finished the evening in an Irish pub watching rugby. A perfect ending to a full and very satisfying day, although I was completely exhausted by the time it was over.
The last day
The next morning it was already time to think about heading home. We started the day with a bit of work for some clients, trying to look productive while secretly still waking up.
After that we visited the big Oslo Library, which turned out to be an incredibly cool place. The kind of building where you suddenly feel ten percent smarter just by walking inside. We wandered around, explored the floors and admired how beautifully designed it all was.
Once we had lunch, the day suddenly moved very fast and it was already time to make our way to the airport and fly back home.
We enjoyed the trip a lot, but we were definitely happy to escape the very cold minus ten degrees in Oslo. My face is still recovering from the freezer‑burn feeling.