Data is everywhere. We send information every time we use a mobile device. Developers leave behind information when they create a new application. Organizations have started realizing the value of harnessing data to aid in digital transformation and gain an industry advantage. Microsoft Fabric provides enterprises with a comprehensive platform with an integrated, end-to-end solution that simplifies data analytics needs.
How Does Fabric Help Businesses?
Thanks to Microsoft Fabric, businesses no longer need to piece together multiple services from different vendors. It brings together components from popular Microsoft products like Power BI, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Synapse. Users can access experiences like Data Factory, Data Warehouse, Real-Time Analytics, and Power BI under one software-as-a-service (SaaS) umbrella.
Understanding OneLake
Microsoft Fabric Lake, also called OneLake, provides the foundation for all Azure Data Fabric services. It provides a unified location for storing organizational data. It’s built on Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2. OneLake makes things simple by removing the need for users to understand the underlying infrastructure like Azure Resource Manager, redundancy, or resource groups.
OneLake also lets businesses get rid of the development of silos that developers often rely on when configuring isolated storage accounts. The hierarchical nature of OneLake simplifies the platform's management across an organization. There’s no need for up-front provisioning with azure service fabric.
Each tenant receives a OneLake instance that provides a single-pane-of-glass file-system namespace for all regions, users, and clouds. Information gets stored in containers for easier management. Every tenant is mapped to the root of OneLake and sits at the top of the hierarchy. It’s possible to create multiple workspaces within a tenant.
Why Choose Microsoft Fabric?
Below is an overview of what sets Microsoft Data Fabric apart from other solutions in the marketplace.
1. End-to-end Analytics Platform
Most analytics projects are made up of multiple subsystems with different capabilities. That usually means businesses must order products from other vendors, making integration a complex and expensive process.
Fabric enables organizations to purchase a single product with a unified architecture providing everything needed for AI data analytics. Developers can extract insights from data and display them to business users.
All users receive a unified SaaS experience that automatically integrates their needed capabilities. Enterprises can provide everyone in the company with a role-specific experience. That means everyone from data engineers to warehousing professionals has the right tools.
2. AI-Powered
Microsoft infused all layers of Fabric with Azure OpenAI Service. It gives developers access to generative AI to use for data analysis. It also helps business users find valuable insights within information gathered by their organization.
The addition of Copilot alongside Fabric adds the ability for users to utilize conversational AI to:
- Construct dataflows and pipelines
- Generate code
- Build machine learning models
- Visualize results
- Create functions
3. Helps all business users
Organizations that make data part of their culture help all users make better decisions. Fabric integrates seamlessly with Microsoft 365 applications that people use every day. Because Power BI is already incorporated into applications like Teams, PowerPoint, and Excel, it’s possible to quickly discover and use relevant information from OneLake.
Fabric lets businesses turn Microsoft 365 apps into centralized locations for locating and applying insights. For example, business users can analyze information in OneLake, generate a Power BI report by clicking a button, then integrate that report into SharePoint.
4. Lowers Costs
Combining products from different vendors requires purchasing multiple licenses. Businesses must also establish computing capacity in other systems to accommodate those applications. If they sit idle, other systems can’t use those resources, leading to significant waste.
Fabric allows businesses to purchase a single computing pool to power all Fabric workloads. The all-inclusive approach lets users create solutions to leverage available workloads without worrying about conflicts. That unified approach lowers cost by letting other workloads consume unused compute capacity.
Microsoft Fabric Components
Below is an overview of the components that power the comprehensive analytics experiences in Microsoft Fabric.
Data Factory
Data factory allows users to create an integration experience that ingests, prepares, and transforms information from data sources like databases and warehouses. Data Factory implements two main features:
- Dataflows — Allows users to leverage over 300 transformations within a data flow designer.
- Data pipelines — Allows users to leverage rich data orchestration capabilities to set up flexible data workflows.
Data Engineering
Data engineering makes it possible for users to build, design, and maintain systems and infrastructures for collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing large data sets. With it, you can:
- Set up and manage information using a lakehouse
- Build pipelines that copy data into a lakehouse
- Submit batch/streaming jobs to Spark cluster using Spark Job definitions
- Write code for data ingestion, preparation, and transformation using notebooks
Data Science
The Data Science home page in Microsoft Fabric gives users access to resources like creating machine learning Experiments, Models, and Notebooks. They can also import existing notebooks to incorporate into current work. Microsoft Fabric makes it possible to complete activities across the entire data science process, including:
- Data Exploration
- Data Preparation
- Data Cleansing
- Data Experimentation
- Data Modeling and Model Scoring
- Predictive Insights
Data Warehouse
The Data warehouse lets users separate compute from storage, allowing for independent scaling of both components. It also stores information within the open Delta Lake format. The unified product helps organizations manage all aspects of data using a unified platform offering SaaS, Analytics, and AI.
Real-Time Analytics
The Real-Time Analytics module in Microsoft Fabric removes a lot of the complexity from data integration. Users gain immediate access to data insights using automatic data streaming, indexing, and partitioning from any data sour or format. The module also provides the ability to perform on-demand query generation and visualizations.
Power BI
Microsoft Fabric integrates the power of Power BI, a collection of apps, services, and connectors. It lets users turn disconnected data sources into a single, visually immersive experience. Users can set up interactive dashboards to create visualizations that reveal valuable insights.
Discover the Power of Microsoft Fabric
With so many new features rolling out within the past year, organizations need help understanding how they might benefit. Internet eBusiness Solutions experts help businesses integrate new technology into their existing workflows. Learn more about how we can help by setting up a consultation.
