What is Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need. Fabric integrates technologies like Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI into a single unified product, empowering data and business professionals alike to unlock the potential of their data and lay the foundation for the era of AI.
Here is the quick overview of Microsoft Fabric.
What sets Microsoft Fabric apart?
Fabric is an end-to-end analytics product that addresses every aspect of an organization’s analytics needs. But there are five areas that really set Fabric apart from the rest of the market:
1. Fabric is a complete analytics platform
Every analytics project has multiple subsystems. Every subsystem needs a different array of capabilities, often requiring products from multiple vendors. Integrating these products can be a complex, fragile, and expensive endeavor.
With Fabric, customers can use a single product with a unified experience and architecture that provides all the capabilities required for a developer to extract insights from data and present it to the business user. And by delivering the experience as software as a service (SaaS), everything is automatically integrated and optimized, and users can sign up within seconds and get real business value within minutes.
Fabric comes with seven core workloads:
- Data Factory (preview) provides more than 150 connectors to cloud and on-premises data sources, drag-and-drop experiences for data transformation, and the ability to orchestrate data pipelines.
- Synapse Data Engineering (preview) enables great authoring experiences for Spark, instant start with live pools, and the ability to collaborate.
- Synapse Data Science (preview) provides an end-to-end workflow for data scientists to build sophisticated AI models, collaborate easily, and train, deploy, and manage machine learning models.
- Synapse Data Warehousing (preview) provides a converged lake house and data warehouse experience with industry-leading SQL performance on open data formats.
- Synapse Real-Time Analytics (preview) enables developers to work with data streaming in from the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, telemetry, logs, and more, and analyze massive volumes of semi-structured data with high performance and low latency.
- Power BI in Fabric provides industry-leading visualization and AI-driven analytics that enable business analysts and business users to gain insights from data. The Power BI experience is also deeply integrated into Microsoft 365, providing relevant insights where business users already work.
- Data Activator (coming soon) provides real-time detection and monitoring of data and can trigger notifications and actions when it finds specified patterns in data—all in a no-code experience.
2. Fabric is lake-centric and open
Today’s data lakes can be messy and complicated, making it hard for customers to create, integrate, manage, and operate data lakes. And once they are operational, multiple data products using different proprietary data formats on the same data lake can cause significant data duplication and concerns about vendor lock-in.
OneLake—The OneDrive for data
Fabric comes with a SaaS, multi-cloud data lake called OneLake that is built-in and automatically available to every Fabric tenant. All Fabric workloads are automatically wired into OneLake, just like all Microsoft 365 applications are wired into OneDrive. Data is organized in an intuitive data hub, and automatically indexed for discovery, sharing, governance, and compliance.
3. Fabric is powered by AI
With Copilot in Microsoft Fabric in every data experience, users can use conversational language to create dataflows and data pipelines, generate code and entire functions, build machine learning models, or visualize results. Customers can even create their own conversational language experiences that combine Azure OpenAI Service models and their data and publish them as plug-ins.
4. Fabric empowers every business user
Power BI is a core part of Fabric and is already infused across Microsoft 365. Through Power BI’s deep integrations with popular applications such as Excel, Microsoft Teams, PowerPoint, and SharePoint, relevant data from OneLake is easily discoverable and accessible to users right from Microsoft 365—helping customers drive more value from their data
5. Fabric reduces costs through unified capacities
Today’s analytics systems typically combine products from multiple vendors in a single project. This results in computing capacity provisioned in multiple systems like data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, and business intelligence. When one of the systems is idle, its capacity cannot be used by another system causing significant wastage.
How do I get started with Microsoft Fabric?
Enabling Fabric in your Power BI tenant
Power BI customers can get access to Fabric today by turning on the Fabric tenant setting in the Power BI admin portal. To give Power BI administrators time to prepare, we have turned off the switch by default. You can choose to opt in or out of Fabric through the admin portal. You can also choose to enable Fabric for specific users or security groups within your tenant. If no action is taken by the administrator, Fabric will be turned on by default for all Power BI tenants starting on July 1.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/admin/fabric-switch#enable-for-your-tenant
Additionally, if you would like to try Fabric in one or more capacities before enabling it for the entire tenant, it can be enabled for specific capacities in the capacity settings tab within the admin portal. Like the tenant setting, this capacity setting can also be limited to specific users or security groups.
Microsoft Fabric resources
If you want to learn more about Microsoft Fabric, consider:
- Signing up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
- Visiting the Microsoft Fabric website.
- Exploring the Fabric technical documentation.
- Reading the free e-book on getting started with Fabric.
- Exploring Fabric through the Guided Tour.