The Agenda 2026

Designing a high-performing Fabric Warehouse is an end-to-end challenge. Performance and cost are shaped long before queries are written—by how data is loaded, organised, cached, clustered, deployed, and served under real workloads. In a SaaS platform like Microsoft Fabric, much of the engine complexity is abstracted away, but successful solutions still depend on making the right architectural and technical design decisions.

This training day takes a systematic, end-to-end approach to performance design in Fabric Warehouses. We follow the lifecycle of data from load to logic, focusing on the decisions that most strongly influence scalability, predictability, and cost efficiency.

We begin with data loading techniques and best practices, covering how to design efficient and resilient ingestion processes and how early loading choices affect downstream performance and maintenance. We then move into core design fundamentals, including table and schema design, efficient T-SQL coding patterns, key generation strategies, and general architectural approaches such as workspace organisation and separation of concerns.

With these foundations in place, we explore performance-related platform features, including caching and data clustering, and how they influence query behaviour in practice. We also cover Workload Management, focusing on how to organise, separate, and align different workloads so that warehouses remain predictable, maintainable, and cost-efficient, and fit for purpose.

The training includes a concise look at deployment practices, focusing on promoting changes safely across environments, and places strong emphasis on monitoring both performance and cost to support informed trade-offs and ongoing optimisation. We conclude by addressing evolution and upgrades, helping attendees understand how to adapt designs as data volumes, workloads, and platform capabilities change.

Throughout the day, concepts are illustrated with examples from real projects and practical feedback from our data engineering team, grounding the discussion in real-world constraints and lessons learned. The emphasis is on building a clear end-to-end mental model of Fabric Warehouses—enabling attendees to make informed design decisions, reduce trial-and-error, and build solutions that balance performance, scalability, and cost in line with real project goals.