22-25 April 2026 
Fabric Capacities, beyond the obvious
Proposed session for SQLBits 2026TL; DR
A deep dive into Microsoft Fabric Capacity planning and management. Learn strategies to control bursting, smoothing, and throttling, monitor usage, respond to issues, scale or offload workloads, and confidently manage capacity health at scale.
Session Details
You’re familiar with Fabric Capacities and how some of the core concepts like Bursting, Smoothing, and Throttling are different from what you’ve seen in other products and solutions? Great! Yet with the knowledge of these concepts, things sometimes still spiral out of control? Uh Oh ..
While the core concepts of Fabric Capacities bring a lot of benefits, they do pose some risks that need to be kept in check when figuring out the appropriate Capacity Planning and Management Strategy for your environment. During this session, we’ll walk through some of the key strategies that we’ve seen out there in the wild with some of the largest and complex customers using Power BI and Microsoft Fabric.
Making sure your plan is solid is an excellent first step, but after that execution is key. What are some of the best practices out there to stay on top of your capacity health and usage, and how do you respond when push comes to shove?
Pausing or scaling the capacities, or moving things around are great, but it requires a bit of thought to get it right. Or maybe it's even worth looking into options to offload the consumption of certain workload types elsewhere?
Walking out of this session you’ll have picked up a few new things on Capacity Management and Monitoring strategies, making you feel more confident to put it out to the masses in your organization. Go forth, and Fabricate!
NOTE: This session is intended as a deep-dive, and has an assumption that you understand the core concepts of bursting, smoothing, and throttling in Fabric Capacities.
While the core concepts of Fabric Capacities bring a lot of benefits, they do pose some risks that need to be kept in check when figuring out the appropriate Capacity Planning and Management Strategy for your environment. During this session, we’ll walk through some of the key strategies that we’ve seen out there in the wild with some of the largest and complex customers using Power BI and Microsoft Fabric.
Making sure your plan is solid is an excellent first step, but after that execution is key. What are some of the best practices out there to stay on top of your capacity health and usage, and how do you respond when push comes to shove?
Pausing or scaling the capacities, or moving things around are great, but it requires a bit of thought to get it right. Or maybe it's even worth looking into options to offload the consumption of certain workload types elsewhere?
Walking out of this session you’ll have picked up a few new things on Capacity Management and Monitoring strategies, making you feel more confident to put it out to the masses in your organization. Go forth, and Fabricate!
NOTE: This session is intended as a deep-dive, and has an assumption that you understand the core concepts of bursting, smoothing, and throttling in Fabric Capacities.
3 things you'll get out of this session
- Assess risks and trade-offs associated with Fabric Capacity features such as bursting, smoothing, and throttling
- Design effective capacity planning and management strategies for complex Power BI and Microsoft Fabric environments
- Apply best practices to monitor capacity health and usage over time
- Respond to capacity pressure through scaling, pausing, workload redistribution, or offloading
- Confidently manage and operationalize Fabric Capacities across an organization
Speakers
Benni De Jagere's other proposed sessions for 2026
A Whirlwind Tour of the Fabric Capacity Metrics App - 2026
Copilot in Fabric - Explained for the Administrator! - 2026
Deep Dive into Microsoft Fabric Capacities: Fundamentals, Concepts, and Advanced Strategies - 2026
Demystifying the on-premises data gateway (for Power BI Semantic Models) - 2026
End-to-end Monitoring for Microsoft Fabric - 2026
Exploring permission boundaries in Microsoft Fabric - 2026
Panel Debate: Real-World Microsoft Fabric Administration - Lessons from the Trenches - 2026
Slide Karaoke - Ultimate Showdown! - 2026
Star Schema ALL the things! But why? - 2026
Understanding Fabric Capacities - 2026
Benni De Jagere's previous sessions
Nose-Dive Narratives: Slide Karaoke 2024
Get ready to wrap up a serious day of learning with a dash of humor, spontaneity, and friendly competition! SQLBits presents "Slide Karaoke" where SQLBits speakers reveal their hidden talents while vying for bragging rights. This session promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience that will leave you in stitches and awe, and the speakers scrambling for their non-existent notes!
Asking questions to get meaningful answers
By making sure we're supplying the other party with the compact information they need, and making sure we're "forcing" them to give a decent answer, there's a lot more information we can receive. By getting the information we need, we'll be able to proceed quicker, and getting to results faster.
Setting yourself up for success when submitting to present
During this session we'll cover how you find those elusive speaking opportunities and how you can make the most of it with just a few simple things to keep in mind. Most importantly, what can you do to help understand organizers or selection committees why exactly your session would be a good fit for them, and why you think it would be a good fit for their audience.
Star Schema ALL the things! But why?
Come along in this journey from source to model to report using a practical mindset, thinking about the design decisions and ramifications along the way. At the core of the session lies the message to think about best practices, with the added step to test, assess, and benchmark what exactly they do for you.
You're a Power BI Admin? Let's get your threads aligned for Fabric!
This session will focus on the life of a Power BI Admin moving over to the extended Fabric realm, and keeping their things in check. We'll look at the familiar topics of capacity and workspace management, and how they align with the new workloads that have been introduced. We'll notice there's a very large overlap, as Fabric has been built on the foundations of Power BI.
How to write a Session Abstract, to get chosen to speak
Writing an abstract is hard, especially for a session you'll probably only be presenting a few months down the road. But have you considered consciously on the words you're writing in there, and what kind of expectations they set to other parties?
Having a balanced abstract will help set the expectations for your presentation correctly, before it actually starts. Clearly outlining the goals helps all parties involved, most importantly yourself!
Troubleshooting Power BI Reports
Starting off with the new Performance Analyzer Pane, we'll demonstrate how you can pinpoint bottlenecks in your report, and take actions on these insights.
With the myriad of root causes that are out there, an elimination approach might suit us very well.
Some of the main causes will be explained, and we'll get you going on how you can fix it for yourselves.
Asking questions to get meaningful answers
Asking questions is a very powerful tool, but can be bothersome to wield. By making sure we're supplying the other party with the compact information they need, and making sure we're "forcing" them to give a decent answer, there's a lot more information we can receive. By getting the information we need, we'll be able to proceed quicker, and getting to results faster.
Power BI dataflows? Why you need to implement it!
During this session, the core concepts of Power BI Dataflows will be explained, and we'll discuss how Power BI Dataflows could alleviate some of the specific problems you might be experiencing in your current architecture.
Troubleshooting Power BI Report Performance
Starting off with the new Performance Analyzer Pane, we'll demonstrate how you can pinpoint bottlenecks in your Power BI reports, and take actions on these insights.