What is Microsoft Fabric?

Introduction

Microsoft Fabric is a complete analytics and data platform for businesses needing a single, integrated solution. It includes report creation, real-time event routing, data transportation, processing, ingestion, and transformation. It provides a full range of services, including databases, data warehouses, data science, data engineering, data factories, and real-time analytics.

Microsoft Fabric integrates separate components into an appropriate stack. OneLake allows for the centralization of data storage without many databases or data warehouses. Fabric’s AI capabilities are easily integrated, negating the need for manual integration. Your raw data may quickly transform into insights that business users can utilize using Fabric.

Combination with the SaaS foundation

Microsoft Fabric is built on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, and more services’ new and old components are combined into a single integrated platform. These elements are then combined to create unique user experiences.

Each of these experiences has a specific purpose and is customized for various user roles, such as scientists, data engineers, or warehousing specialists.

The data journey is accelerated by the AI integration throughout the Fabric stack. These tasks complement one another seamlessly and offer the following benefits:

• Access to the industry’s largest suite of closely connected analytics.
• Shared experiences with experiences that are familiar and simple to learn.
• All assets are easily accessible and may be used again.
• Unified data lake storage keeps data in its original place as you use your favorite analytics tools.
• Centralized management and governance for all experiences.

Fabric seamlessly integrates data and services, allowing for uniform administration, governance, and discovery. It provides security for items, data, and row-level access. Core corporate functionalities may be configured centrally. For every underlying service, permissions are applied automatically. Additionally, data sensitivity labels are automatically inherited throughout the suite’s elements. Governance is powered by Purview, which is integrated into Fabric.

Microsoft Fabric components

Microsoft Fabric provides a full suite of analytics experiences that have been designed to operate together effectively. The platform defines each of these experiences to a certain persona and work.

Power BI – Power BI enables you to effortlessly connect to your data sources, visualize and find what’s essential, and share it with whoever you choose. This integrated interface enables business owners to rapidly and simply access all data in Fabric, allowing them to make more informed data decisions.

Data Factory – Data Factory provides a modern data integration experience for ingesting, preparing, and transforming data from an extensive variety of sources. It combines the ease of use with Power Query, and it offers over 200 native connectors for connecting to cloud and on-premises data sources.

Data Activator – Data Activator is a no-code experience in Fabric that lets you programmatically set up events, such as email alerts and Power Automate processes, to start when Data Activator finds particular patterns or situations in your growing data. It keeps an eye on data in Power BI reports and event streams, and it automatically takes the necessary action when the data reaches predetermined thresholds or matches other patterns.

Industry Solutions – Fabric offers industry-specific data solutions, such as data management, analytics, and decision-making, that cater to particular market needs and problems.

Real-Time Intelligence – Real-time Intelligence provides a complete solution for event-driven scenarios, streaming data, and data logs. It handles data intake, transformation, storage, analytics, visualization, tracking, artificial intelligence, and real-time actions to enable the extraction of insights, visualization, and action on data in motion. Real-Time Intelligence’s Real-Time hub offers a multitude of no-code connectors that come together to provide a catalog of organizational data that is regulated, safeguarded, and integrated across Fabric.

Synapse Data Engineering – Synapse Data Engineering offers a Spark platform with great authoring experiences. It allows you to build, manage, and optimize infrastructures for large-scale data collection, storage, processing, and analysis. Fabric Spark’s connection with Data Factory enables you to schedule and orchestrate Notebooks and Spark processes.

Synapse Data Science  – Synapse Data Science allows you to create, deploy, and operationalize machine learning models using Fabric. It works with Azure Machine Learning to enable built-in experiment tracking and model registration. Data scientists may enhance organizational data with predictions, and business analysts can include those predictions in their BI reports, enabling for a transition from descriptive to predictive insights.

Synapse Data Warehouse – Synapse Data Warehouse offers SQL scalability and performance that leads the market. It separates computation and storage, allowing for independent scalability of both components. Additionally, data is naturally stored in the open Delta Lake format.

Microsoft Fabric is an implementation of Data Mesh architecture that helps businesses and people transform large and complex storage systems into significant workloads and analytics.