We're at capacity, now what?
Proposed session for SQLBits 2026TL; DR
Due to the excellent concepts of bursting and smoothing with Fabric capacities, you might find yourself "at capacity" without understanding the cause or knowing how to address it.
At the end of this session you will have a better view on how the Fabric capacities smoothing & bursting works, what to do when you suddenly hit the limits and how to plan efficiently to avoid overruns in the future.
Session Details
Fabric capacities are great! They highly simplify the way we work with our data and the cost control that comes with it. However, they also present certain challenges. Estimating the necessary capacity in advance can be difficult. And due to the excellent concepts of bursting and smoothing, you (and your team) might find yourself "at capacity" without understanding the cause or knowing how to address it.
This talk will handle, based on my own experiences at customers:
- Explain the concepts of bursting & smoothing with interactive and background activities, using some easy-to-understand examples and highlight the way these features can (unexpectedly) overload your capacity.
- Dig deeper in monitoring methods such as the capacity metrics app and monitoring hub, that can help identifying the root causes of capacity overruns and elaborate on the most common causes we’ve seen in the field.
- How you can quickly keep your capacity going when you’ve hit the capacity
- Explain strategies can help manage this short - and longer term:
- capacity planning (using multiple capacities, optimizing with PPU or Power BI Pro licensing, ...)
- optimizing workloads (such as DataFlow Gen1 vs. Gen2, warehouse vs. Lakehouse workloads, Spark High-concurrency, ...
- leveraging new Fabric features such as Autoscale Billing for Spark or surge protection
At the end of this session you will have a better view on how the Fabric capacities smoothing & bursting works, what to do when you suddenly hit the limits and how to plan efficiently to avoid overruns in the future.
This talk will handle, based on my own experiences at customers:
- Explain the concepts of bursting & smoothing with interactive and background activities, using some easy-to-understand examples and highlight the way these features can (unexpectedly) overload your capacity.
- Dig deeper in monitoring methods such as the capacity metrics app and monitoring hub, that can help identifying the root causes of capacity overruns and elaborate on the most common causes we’ve seen in the field.
- How you can quickly keep your capacity going when you’ve hit the capacity
- Explain strategies can help manage this short - and longer term:
- capacity planning (using multiple capacities, optimizing with PPU or Power BI Pro licensing, ...)
- optimizing workloads (such as DataFlow Gen1 vs. Gen2, warehouse vs. Lakehouse workloads, Spark High-concurrency, ...
- leveraging new Fabric features such as Autoscale Billing for Spark or surge protection
At the end of this session you will have a better view on how the Fabric capacities smoothing & bursting works, what to do when you suddenly hit the limits and how to plan efficiently to avoid overruns in the future.
3 things you'll get out of this session
- Understanding the concepts of bursting and smoothing
- Get an overview on all monitoring options
- Get to know the best capacity strategies for your use case