Fabric Capacities, beyond the obvious

Proposed session for SQLBits 2026

TL; 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.

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