Say hello to Microsoft Fabric - a unified data analytics platform for the AI era
We don’t need to tell you how important your data is to your organisation. Everyday, businesses like yours are using data to get ahead of the competition. Now, with AI set to take over the world, we need to continue that digital journey incorporating the transformative advantages that AI has to offer.
Generative AI and language model services, such as Azure OpenAI Service, will allow you to re-invent and transform how your teams carry out everyday tasks. But to do this well, you will need an integrated analytics system supplying you with high quality, clean data.
For most people this is far from reality – with customers forced to stitch together their own systems from multiple different vendors – trying to create something that works from a set of fragmented and disjointed services.
Our Microsoft Fabric Consultants can help you plan your Fabric journey.
Introducing Microsoft Fabric
Step forward Microsoft Fabric – a unified analytics platform launched in November 2023 which brings together Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI in one place - handing you all the data and analytics tools you need. Whether you are a data expert or business professional this product allows you to unlock the potential of your data in the era of AI.
Watch the video overview here.
What makes Fabric different?
Fabric covers your business analytics needs end to end and has five advantages that really stand-out.
A total analytics platform
A unified architecture means you can say goodbye to complex integrations with multiple products and vendors.
Fabric gives you all the capabilities a developer needs to get the insights that really matter to the business user. Delivered as a service users can get real business value straight away with a system that is fully integrated, optimised and ready to go.
With role-specific functionality, data engineers, data warehousing professionals, data scientists, data analysts, and business users all feel catered to.
According to Microsoft, Fabric comes with seven core workloads:
- Data Factory (preview) provides more than 150 connectors to cloud and on-premises data sources, drag-and-drop data transformation, and the ability to orchestrate data pipelines.
- Synapse Data Engineering (preview) great authoring experiences for Spark, instant start with live pools, and collaboration tools.
- Synapse Data Science (preview) end-to-end workflows allow data scientists to build sophisticated AI models, collaborate, 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 from Internet of Things (IoT) devices, telemetry, logs - analyze huge 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 for business users as they work.
- Data Activator (coming soon) for real-time detection and monitoring of data. Triggers notifications and actions when it finds specified patterns in
One-Lake – the One-Drive for data
Fabric comes with an 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, indexed for discovery, sharing, governance, and compliance.
OneLake serves developers, business analysts, and business users alike, helping to eliminate chaotic data silos created by different developers. This single, unified storage system makes discovery and sharing data simpler and more straightforward with centrally controlled policy and security settings. At the API layer, OneLake is built on and fully compatible with Azure Data Lake
Storage Gen2 (ADLSg2), instantly tapping into ADLSg2’s huge ecosystem of applications, tools, and developers.
Includes the “Shortcuts” feature which allows easy sharing of data between users and applications without having to move and duplicate information, enabling developers to compose and analyze data across clouds.
Fabric is committed to open data formats across all its workloads and tiers - Delta on top of Parquet files is the native data format default for all workloads which means customers only need to load the data once. It also means that OneLake supports structured data of any format as well as unstructured data, giving customers total flexibility.
Microsoft say “By adopting OneLake as our store and Delta and Parquet as the common format for all workloads, we offer customers a data stack that’s unified at the most fundamental level. Customers do not need to maintain different copies of data for databases, data lakes, data warehousing, business intelligence, or real-time analytics. Instead, a single copy of the data in OneLake can directly power all the workloads.“
Fabric also provides a universal security model to eliminate the nightmare of operating different data engines.
Powered up by AI
Fabric is powered by the Azure OpenAI Service at every layer to help customers unlock the full potential of their data. Apply the power of generative AI to get valuable insights from your data. Business users will find it straightforward to interact using natural language to create dataflows and data pipelines, generate code and entire functions, build machine learning models, and visualize results.
Insights for everyone
We believe that customers make better decisions when everyone is empowered to get the most from their data which is why we love the fact that Fabric integrates with the Microsoft 365 applications teams use every day.
Power BI is central to Fabric and is already infused across Microsoft 365. Now with deep integrations into well-used applications like Excel, Microsoft Teams, PowerPoint, and SharePoint, relevant data from OneLake is easy to find and use directly from Microsoft 365—giving customers true value from their data. Here’s a few examples;
- Fabric turns your Microsoft 365 apps into hubs for uncovering and applying insights.
- Microsoft Excel users: discover and analyze data in OneLake, generate a Power BI report - all with a click of a button.
- Teams, users: bring data into everyday work with embedded channels, chat, and meeting experiences.
- Business users: infuse presentations with embedded live Power BI reports directly in Microsoft PowerPoint.
- Power BI is also natively integrated with SharePoint, enabling easy sharing and dissemination of insights.
- Microsoft Graph Data Connect (preview), integrates Microsoft 365 into OneLake to unlock insights into customer relationships, business processes, security and compliance, and people productivity.
Exceptional value and reduced costs
Reduce wastage with Fabric’s integrated system. No need to combine products from multiple vendors and waste computing power- get data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, and business intelligence all on a single system.
Customers can create frictionless digital solutions that leverage all workloads freely, significantly reducing costs, as any unused computing capacity in one workload can be utilized by any of the others.
Where does Fabric fit in?
Fabric is an evolution of existing Microsoft products such as Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Data Explorer, which will continue to provide a solution for data analytics customers. Fabric is a simplified SaaS solution that can connect to existing PaaS offerings and customers can upgrade at their own pace.
Microsot Fabric continues to evolve with new features going in to preview each month. You can view the latest preview features here.
How to get started?
Microsoft Fabric was released in November 2023. After July 1, 2023, Fabric was enabled for all Power BI tenants.
Please contact us for more information on how we can help you get the best from this exciting new development in the evolution of AI era Business Analytics!
Message us here….https://www.ptr.co.uk/contact Or connect with us on LinkedIn https://uk.linkedin.com/company/ptr-associates. We are always happy to help you with your data platform choices and BI data strategy planning and journey.
Find customer stories and further resources on Microsoft Fabric here https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-microsoft-fabric-data...