This year’s event clearly demonstrated one thing: Artificial Intelligence is no longer an isolated capability. It is becoming an integral and important part of every data and analytics process within Microsoft Fabric.

As usually during such big event, bringing together about 5000 users, community members and interested people, Microsoft introduced a significant enhancements or new features.

Some of them are :

• Azure SQL Server local
• AI Powered database operations
• Fabric IQ
• Fabric deployment plan
• Observability in Fabric
• Fabric catalog new capabilities with AI and policies
• Fabric on-demand billing F0
• Planning in Fabric
• Modern report builder in Power BI
• App development in Fabric
• Warehouse GPU accelerator
• Ontology in Fabric

Microsoft Fabric Continues to Evolve Rapidly

Since its introduction, Microsoft Fabric has established itself as a unified platform that brings together data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, real-time analytics, and business intelligence. .

The focus is no longer only on consolidating data workloads into a single platform. The emphasis has shifted toward making data more intelligent, more accessible, and more actionable through AI-powered experiences.

One of the most striking themes throughout the conference was the pervasive integration of AI capabilities across the Fabric ecosystem.

It is helping bridge that gap by allowing users to interact with the data using natural language, automate repetitive tasks, and accelerate analytics workflows.

Some key trends presented during the event included:

• AI-assisted data preparation and transformation
• Automated insight generation
• Natural language querying
• AI-driven report creation and enhancement
• Intelligent monitoring and optimization of data platforms

The objective is clear: reduce complexity and enable both technical and business users to extract value from data faster.

The Rise of AI Agents

We know that AI is able to make our live easier to helping us to setup things much quicker.

We use it today to find information to setup things more quickly.

Perhaps the most exciting topic discussed during the conference was the emergence of AI Agents.

Moving beyond traditional copilots, AI Agents are designed to perform tasks autonomously, orchestrate processes, and interact with multiple systems while leveraging enterprise data securely and ensure and guide AI engine to respond with correct answer.

Within the Microsoft ecosystem, AI Agents have the potential to:

• Analyze business data proactively
• Generate recommendations and insights
• Trigger workflows and business actions
• Support decision-making processes
• Interact with users using natural language

This evolution represents a significant step toward intelligent business applications where AI is not only assisting users but actively contributing to operational efficiency and innovation.

Expand you data insight boundaries with ontology

This new Fabric IQ feature is also present throughout the conference. It enables you to create your business model from your data used by AI agent as your business knowledge layer.

You can see it as a data models reconciliation avoiding AI agent to be confused by identities that are named differently across the multitude of data models you can have.

In y shell Fabric ontology is about :

• Improving natural-language querying.
• Providing better context for AI-generated insights.
• Standardizing business metrics and attributes across reports.
• Reducing ambiguity when multiple data sources contain similar information

App deployment

Fabrics enable now to deploy App to provide an application layer instead of creating reports and dashboards. By only prompting and giving the AI you app specifications you can easily create applications for your end users to provide better data insight experience. You can as well integrate Fabric data agents within your app to provide natural-language data analysis capabilities to your users.

What about security and governance

Even with all this new AI capabilities, AI will only acces what users are authorized to see. In other words, AI agent never bypass fabric permissions you have defined.

But the risk that users using with AI agents send business data outside their tenant is increasing. Therefore data governance is essential before adopting broadly AI within an organization :

• Purview policies
• Access restrictions
• Data classification
• Workspace segregation
• Role-based security
• RLS and OLS

The take away

AI is a reality we cannot ignore and bypass we have to adopt it quickly, and the evolution and capabilities are amayzing it can make our lives easier and has a real business added value.

There is always a but…don’t forget the governance…don’t forget the to manage and control the AI…and constantly auditing deeply you environment becomes more and more essential. And you know what, AI in this field will be you best friend again.

Stay alert and tune

L’article FabCon 2026 Barcelona: Artificial Intelligence Takes Center Stage in Microsoft Fabric est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.

These discussions usually involve critical environments based on Oracle WebLogic Server, Oracle Forms, and sometimes Oracle Reports. The objective is rarely just to “move to the cloud”. It is about understanding what can realistically be migrated, what should be modernized, what must be validated, and where the main technical, operational, and licensing risks are.

Based on these discussions, I would like to share a few practical considerations that may be useful when evaluating a cloud migration strategy for Oracle Fusion Middleware workloads.

Lift and shift is not a shortcut, it is a controlled migration strategy

For Oracle WebLogic, Forms and Reports platforms, a cloud migration should not automatically be presented as an application modernization project.

In many cases, the first realistic step is a lift-and-shift migration. The goal is not to rewrite Forms modules, redesign the full application, or replace every legacy component immediately. The goal is to rebuild a controlled target platform in the cloud while preserving the application behavior as much as possible.

However, lift and shift does not mean copying virtual machines and hoping that everything will work.

A serious migration requires a detailed comparison between the existing platform and the target one: WebLogic domain configuration, Managed Servers, Datasources, Wallets, Certificates, JVM version, Patch level, Forms runtime configuration, Reports configuration, File system dependencies, Fonts, Printers, Batch jobs, Monitoring, Backup, Restart procedures, and Operational scripts.

Oracle documents several WebLogic migration approaches to OCI, including manual deployment, WebLogic Deploy Tooling, and WLST-based deployment scripts targeted to a new domain. Oracle also describes WebLogic Server for OCI as a way to provision a WebLogic domain in OCI more quickly than a traditional on-premises setup.

This is why lift and shift should be seen as an engineering exercise, not as a low-effort infrastructure move.

Why OCI is naturally aligned with Oracle Fusion Middleware

It would not be accurate to say that Oracle Fusion Middleware can only run on OCI. Oracle’s own cloud licensing policy lists AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform as “Authorized Cloud Environments” for specific Oracle software licensing rules. The same policy also explains how vCPUs must be counted in these environments and states that the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table is not applicable there.

So the real point is not that other clouds are impossible. The point is that OCI is naturally aligned with Oracle Fusion Middleware workloads.

For WebLogic, Oracle provides OCI-specific deployment models, Marketplace-based options, and documented migration patterns. For Kubernetes-based deployments, Oracle also documents WebLogic Server for OKE using a Marketplace stack, including lifecycle-management components such as Jenkins and the WebLogic Kubernetes Operator.

From an operational and licensing perspective, OCI also gives Oracle customers options such as BYOL and Universal Credits-based models. Oracle’s Support Rewards FAQ states that BYOL services on the Universal Credits Model rate card are eligible for the Support Rewards program.

This does not remove the need for a proper license review. But it does mean that for Oracle middleware workloads, OCI often provides a more Oracle-native discussion: infrastructure, middleware, licensing, support model, and target architecture can be addressed within the same ecosystem.

Oracle Reports must be treated as a specific risk

For Oracle Forms and WebLogic, a structured lift-and-shift approach to OCI can be a realistic option. For Oracle Reports, the discussion must be more careful.

Oracle Reports is still present in many enterprise Forms platforms, but it has technical characteristics that must be validated before any cloud migration. Reports cluster members or clients use multicast to discover other nodes, and that there is no workaround for using multicast in that context.

This is a critical point because multicast is generally not available in all cloud network architectures.

In practical terms, Oracle Reports should not be treated as a simple checkbox in the migration plan. It requires a dedicated technical validation: Reports Server configuration, naming service, generated output, cache behavior, fonts, printers, file paths, batch execution, restart behavior, and integration with the Forms application.

Conclusion

The conclusion is therefore simple: WebLogic and Forms can be good candidates for a controlled lift-and-shift migration to OCI. Oracle Reports must be assessed separately, tested carefully, and challenged architecturally.

OCI can reduce complexity for Oracle Fusion Middleware migrations, but it does not remove the need for deep product expertise. A successful migration is not only a cloud project, it is a WebLogic, Forms, Reports, licensing, operations, and validation project.

If you are planning to migrate an Oracle Fusion Middleware platform to the cloud, or if you simply want to assess whether such a migration is realistic for your environment, feel free to contact me. I would be happy to help you challenge the architecture, identify the risks, and define a pragmatic migration approach.

More related blogs here.

L’article Oracle Fusion Middleware to the Cloud est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.

We turn up on a Monday morning and there are alerts from the weekend saying

[MSSQL] – Instance Dark_Vador-Data(F:): Disk space in GB on server Death_Star is critical

Info: NOT OK – Free space: 20 MB out of 200 GB

The storage is almost full and:
– no projects were deployed over the weekend
– no exceptional data loads were scheduled
– nobody works at the weekend

A strange phenomenon to come across on a Monday morning….

On closer inspection, the findings are surprising; we can see that a database within the instance has been undergoing regular autogrowth for weeks…

Every day, there are several regular autogrowth on the data file for this database until the saturation of the disk.

Who is the culprit?

Not the business data, but one or more tables named xxxxLog or Historyxxx, or the combination of both HistoryLog!

PS: It’s an example but in the reality before the weekend, we will have Warnings and in the majority of the cases we react before the critical alert of course!

Data created to diagnose a problem, track an activity or maintain a history, which is then never cleaned up or has a default retention period that is too long and unsuitable for the context, is not always easy to detect.

On the other hand, it’s always easier to expand disk capacity without too much effort, and everything runs smoothly in an ideal world…

We, however, are Green SQL Server DBA; we’ll look deeper.
Our curiosity will lead us to challenge the business on these points.

The AUDIT

First, you need to know the autogrowth settings for these databases and how the data file growth.
Here is a simple script that shows the settings:

SELECT
    DB_NAME(database_id) AS DatabaseName,
    name AS LogicalFileName,
    type_desc AS FileType,
    physical_name AS PhysicalFileName,
    size / 128.0 AS CurrentSizeMB,
    CASE
        WHEN is_percent_growth = 1
            THEN CAST(growth AS VARCHAR(10)) + ' %'
        ELSE CAST(growth / 128 AS VARCHAR(10)) + ' MB'
    END AS AutoGrowth,
    max_size,
    CASE
        WHEN max_size = -1 THEN 'Unlimited'
        ELSE CAST(max_size / 128 AS VARCHAR(20)) + ' MB'
    END AS MaxSize
FROM sys.master_files where type_desc='ROWS' AND database_id > 4
ORDER BY
    DatabaseName,
    FileType,
    LogicalFileName;

Like for my precedent blog “Green SQL Server DBA Tips  #1 – Are unnecessary indexes cluttering up your database?”, I use the Dynamics database as example:

In my script, I exclude all system databases and the Log File to be concentrated to the Data File.

Now, I need to have the data file growth. This is through the default trace file and the event 92:

DECLARE @TraceFile NVARCHAR(500);

SELECT @TraceFile = path
FROM sys.traces
WHERE is_default = 1;

IF @TraceFile IS NULL
BEGIN
    RAISERROR('Default Trace is disabled.',16,1);
    RETURN;
END

;WITH GrowthEvents AS
(
    SELECT
        DB_NAME(DatabaseID) AS DatabaseName, FileName, CAST(StartTime AS DATE) AS GrowthDate,
        DATEPART(YEAR, StartTime) AS YearNum, DATEPART(WEEK, StartTime) AS WeekNum,
        DATEPART(MONTH, StartTime) AS MonthNum, IntegerData * 8.0 / 1024 AS GrowthMB
    FROM fn_trace_gettable(@TraceFile, DEFAULT)
    WHERE EventClass IN (92) -- 92 is data growth
)

SELECT DatabaseName,FileName,GrowthDate,COUNT(*) AS GrowthEvents,SUM(GrowthMB) AS TotalGrowthMB
FROM GrowthEvents GROUP BY DatabaseName,FileName,GrowthDate ORDER BY DatabaseName, GrowthDate

As I don’t have any growth on the dynamicsBC database, I switch to the M-Files database for my example:

We have here some daily growth…

Go to see if we have historical or log tables in M-Files with this simple script who give us  the table and the row count and MB:

SELECT s.name AS Schema_Name,t.name AS Table_Name,
    SUM(p.rows) AS Row_Count, CAST(SUM(a.total_pages) * 8.0 / 1024 AS DECIMAL(18,2)) AS SizeMB
FROM sys.tables t INNER JOIN sys.schemas s     ON t.schema_id = s.schema_id
INNER JOIN sys.indexes i ON t.object_id = i.object_id
INNER JOIN sys.partitions p ON i.object_id = p.object_id  AND i.index_id = p.index_id
INNER JOIN sys.allocation_units a ON p.partition_id = a.container_id
WHERE t.name LIKE 'Histor%' OR t.name LIKE '%Log'
GROUP BY s.name, t.name ORDER BY SizeMB DESC;

The ANALISYS

In my case, we can see that we have 383550 lignes (19.73Mb) on the table named OBJECTTYPECHANGELOG for a M-Files database.

It’s only ~20MB here but in few months perhaps 20 GB or more…

As a Green SQL Server DBA, I will contact the owner of M-Files project otherwise don’t forget that dbi services has also the expertise in ECM tools like M-Files.

The IMPACT

Like in my precedent post, we will have the same impacts

The first impact is on DML INSERT operations.

With every insertion, the log or historical information is written to the table and update perhaps also index and at the end is never used by a query.

The second impact is the storage and the backup

If the log table represents ~20 GB of the database.

It’s 20 GB backed up unnecessarily, 20 GB restored unnecessarily and, above all, 20 GB stored unnecessarily and just for one environment.

If you have Dev, Test, PreProd & Prod and all in HA… I let you do the calculation but it’s more 100 GB!

The third impact is on the maintenance plan

The following operations must also handle the log/historical tables:
– Rebuild Index
– Reorganise Index
– CheckDB
– Backups
– Restores

Each growth of log/historical tables extends the maintenance windows…

The ADVISE

You really need to be careful before deleting anything in these table.

Don’t Truncate the table because you see it!

First see with the vendor if a purge or a retention parameter exists through the application. 

In my case with M-Files and the table OBJECTTYPECHANGELOG, in the administration interface, you can configure the retention. Go to challenge your M-Files team on it!

Finally, for every large log or historical table, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
– Who uses it?
– How often?
– Is there a legal obligation?
– What retention period is required?
– Can it be archived?
– Can it be purged?

The Green SQL Server DBA Score

Like for my precedent post, I setup a ‘SQL Server DBA Score’ to use for my tips on the subject:

Conclusion

A traditional SQL Server DBA or system administrator will see a data disk full and says:

“How much GB need we to extend the disk?”

A Green SQL Server DBA sees a data disk full and says:

“Why is my disk full and what can I do?”

Just like adding a larger trunk doesn’t make a car more efficient, adding more GB doesn’t make a database healthier.

The greenest SQL Server DBA is not the one with the largest disks but it’s the one that keeps only data that continues to deliver value.

Think about it and begin now to see if you have cases!

See you soon for the next one! 

L’article Green SQL Server DBA Tips #2 – When logs and history records cause your database to growth and crash est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.

Installation

The installation is very straight forward and well documented, it can take some time for the creation of the necessary self signed certificated for the Microsoft Azure Application. In addition, you must ensure that you have management access to the Microsoft Azure Admin Centre or an admin aside to perform the required steps

I will. not go through each step in detail, but I will highlight important steps from my point of view. The step by step documentation can be found on the M-Files web page for Integrations.

Important steps:

• Allow third-party cookies for Outlook Web.
  https://[*.]office365.com
  https://[*.]office.com
• Ensure that the lins below not blocked by the firewall.
  https://mfnewoutlookaddinprod.m-files.com
  https://login.microsoftonline.com/common
  https://login.m-files.com/
• Create a self signed certificate and convert them to be able to configure the M-Files Vault Application.
• Create and configure the Application in Azure, according the M-Files documentation.
• Installation and configure the M-Files Vault Application, just follow the M-Files documnetation.
• Install or deploy the M-Files for Outlook add-in. It is a certified Microsoft application. It can be installed individually or deployed to a specific group of users. This is the standard Microsoft process.
  

Create a self signed certificate for use in a cloud setup

Open PowerShell with administrative access and use the command below.

$certname = "{certificateName}"    ## Replace {certificateName}
$cert = New-SelfSignedCertificate -Subject "CN=$certname" -CertStoreLocation "Cert:\CurrentUser\My" -KeyExportPolicy Exportable -KeySpec Signature -KeyLength 2048 -KeyAlgorithm RSA -HashAlgorithm SHA256

Export-Certificate -Cert $cert -FilePath "C:\Users\admin\Desktop\$certname.cer"   ## Specify your preferred location

$mypwd = ConvertTo-SecureString -String "{myPassword}" -Force -AsPlainText  ## Replace {myPassword}

Export-PfxCertificate -Cert $cert -FilePath "C:\Users\admin\Desktop\$certname.pfx" -Password $mypwd   ## Specify your preferred location

In case you get an execution error from PowerShell, you can use the command below to allow the execution

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -Force

If everything worked as expected you have files as in the example below.

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
-a----        29/06/2026     08:18            772 testcert.cer
-a----        29/06/2026     08:20           2644 testcert.pfx

To convert the certificates, you will need to use OpenSSH and Cygwin. M-Files strongly recommends using Cygwin. I encountered issues when I did not use Cygwin and it did not work.
Conversion is required in order to configure the certificate within the M-Files Vault application.

After the installation of Cygwin the command below must be executed in a Cygwin command window.

openssl pkcs12 -in MyCert.pfx -out MyCert.pem -nokeys

openssl pkcs12 -in MyCert.pfx -out MyCert.key -nocerts

openssl rsa -in MyCert.key -out MyCert_encrypted.key -aes256

Configure the Outlook and M-Files rules

You can use the Outlook and M-Files rules to automatically save received emails to the M-Files system. It is important to understand how each rule works within the M-Files Outlook add-in. This differs from creating an object in M-Files, where the workflow and required state must be explicitly defined.

Open the M-Files Outlook Add-In in Outlook and navigate to “Manage folder rules.

The screenshot below shows the configuration of the Outlook folder “Firma A – Projekt A”, which will be imported automatically and assigned to the M-Files class ‘Email Import’. Additionally, the “Email Import Validation” workflow with the state “Import prüfen” is assigned.
If the workflow is not defined in the rule, it will not be assigned as expected. As we know, when a new object is created in M-Files, the workflow of the class is used automatically.

Conclusion

In order to automate the process of moving incoming emails into M-Files, two steps are required. First, define the usual Outlook rule, then create a rule in the M-Files Outlook add-in, as explained above.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us or directly with me if you have any more questions or need support with implementation.

L’article M-Files Outlook Pro add-in configuration est apparu en premier sur dbi Blog.