Microsoft Fabric

What is Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric is the newly released one-stop shop for analytics, which spans data workloads from data movement to data science, Real-Time Analytics, and business intelligence. It offers a comprehensive suite of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data services, including data lake, data engineering, and data integration, all in one place.

Why is Microsoft Fabric a big deal?

Microsoft Fabric adopted the lakehouse architecture with open-source Delta file format and provided a unified data lake that supports multiple data types, such as structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. They also adapted the existing mature and performant query engines, from Power BI to the SQL engine, to fully support the delta format in favor of big data and analytical processing. By adapting and adopting structural for a long-term vision, Fabric helps enterprises leverage the power of data and gain insights for better decision-making.

What are the Components of Microsoft Fabric?

Data Engineering is based on the same technology as the Spark pools in Azure Synapse Analytics; it allows for notebooks & thus gives a code-first data engineering. However, a nice touch: Spark resources in Fabric can now be provided serverless using “live pools”.
Azure Data Factory combines the simplicity of Power Query with the scale and power of Azure Data Factory. You can use over 200 native connectors to connect to data sources on-premises and in the cloud.
Data Science which provides for training, deployment, and management of machine learning models. This component is also mainly based on Spark, but incorporates elements of Azure Machine Learning, SQL Server Machine Learning Services, and the open-source MLflow project.
Data Warehouse, known as initially Azure SQL Data Warehouse technology and now “converged” to Lakehouse. Note that to enable this and connect Fabric to OneLake (a Lakehouse), Microsoft made a massive effort in optimizing the SQL engine to ensure that BI users can benefit from Data-Warehouse-like performance while running actually 'on a Data Lake' and not a database.
Real-Time Analytics aims to combine Azure Event Hubs, Azure Stream Analytics, and Azure Data Explorer and supports OT analytics and thus analytics on IoT, telemetry, log, and other streaming data sources.
Power BI is Microsoft’s flagship business intelligence platform, but soon-to-be enhanced with a new large language model AI-based Copilot experience that can generate DAX (Data Analysis eXpressions — Power BI’s native query language).