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What Is Microsoft Fabric? Consultancy Services

Say hello to Microsoft Fabric - a unified data analytics platform for the AI era

Everyday, businesses like yours are using data to get ahead of the competition. Now, we need to continue that digital journey incorporating the transformative advantages that AI has to offer.

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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.

Microsoft Fabric Overview

Microsoft Fabric was launched in November 2023 and 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.
Since its launch, Microsoft Fabric has become the industry standard for unified data estates. As an established platform, it is already natively available in your Power BI tenant, allowing your organisation to activate enterprise-grade data lakes instantly without complex cloud onboarding.
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What Makes Fabric different?

Fabric covers your business analytics needs end to end. 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.

Microsoft Fabric Core Features

Microsoft Fabric unifies your entire data estate into a single, cohesive software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.
Rather than stitching together fragmented cloud services, your team works within a single environment powered by OneLake - a central repository that ensures a single version of the truth without data duplication.
  • Data Factory: Streamlines data integration by providing over 150 native connectors. It allows teams to build complex multi-step data pipelines and no-code Dataflows (Gen2) to ingest and transform data from any source.
  • Data Engineering: Designed for big data processing, this workload empowers data engineers to manage, clean, and scale massive datasets using high-performance Apache Spark environments and customizable, collaboration-ready Python notebooks.
  • Data Lakehouse: The foundational data store within Fabric. It combines the clean structure of a traditional data warehouse with the massive, cost-effective storage capacity of a data lake. It allows data engineers to store raw files alongside structured tables using the open-source Delta Parquet format, making data instantly accessible to Spark, SQL, and Power BI.
  • Data Warehouse: Delivers an enterprise-grade relational database experience. It separates compute from storage, allowing separate teams to scale performance independently while natively storing data in the open-source Delta Parquet format.
  • Data Science: Provides an end-to-end workflow for data scientists to build, train, and deploy advanced machine learning models. It integrates natively with MLflow to track experiments and seamlessly scores data directly inside your lakehouse.
  • Real-Time Intelligence: Optimized for event-driven data, this workload handles high-velocity, high-volume streaming data from IoT devices, system logs, and telemetry. It enables instantaneous analysis and real-time visual dashboarding.
  • Power BI: The industry-leading business intelligence tool is deeply woven into Fabric. Utilising the innovative "Direct Lake" mode, Power BI charts can query multi-terabyte datasets sitting inside OneLake instantly - completely bypassing the need to import or refresh data.
  • Data Activator: Serves as the automated "digital nervous system" of your data platform. It continuously monitors your streaming data and Power BI reports to trigger immediate alerts, automate workflows, and launch operational processes the moment specific data thresholds are met.
  • Microsoft Purview Data Governance: Operating as a native, foundational layer across all Fabric experiences, this workload ensures your information asset catalogue remains secure. It automates sensitive data discovery, enforces data loss prevention (DLP) policies, and tracks comprehensive data lineage from ingestion to dashboard.
  • Fabric Databases: (including native Fabric SQL Database and Cosmos DB integration) to handle operational, transactional workloads (OLTP). These are built on the SQL Server engine and natively mirror their data directly into OneLake in real time without any ETL configuration.
  • Mirroring: Instead of building complex Data Factory pipelines to constantly copy data from external databases, Mirroring creates a live, read-only replication link. It continuously syncs data from external systems—like Snowflake, Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, and MongoDB—directly into Fabric’s OneLake as Delta Parquet files with zero management overhead.
  • API for GraphQL: A developer-focused data access layer built into Fabric. It allows applications and frontend developers to query data stored across various Fabric Lakehouses and Warehouses using a single, secure, high-performance GraphQL endpoint, completely abstracting away complex backend SQL or Spark connections.
  • Fabric Extensibility & Custom Workloads: Fabric is no longer a closed Microsoft-only ecosystem. Third-party software vendors (ISVs) and internal enterprise development teams can build, deploy, and govern custom applications and independent workloads directly inside the Fabric user interface and workspace infrastructure.

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 analyse 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

Early releases of Fabric were powered by the Azure OpenAI Service to help customers unlock the full potential of their data and apply the power of generative AI to get valuable insights from your data.
This was replaced by Copilot in Microsoft Fabric and Fabric Data Agents mean that business users can now deploy autonomous agents that actively monitor OneLake data and textually answer complex business questions in real time.
Business users 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 analyse 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.
GraphQL 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.
Microsoft Fabric continues to evolve with new features going in to preview each month. You can view the latest preview features here.

How can PTR Help?

Please contact us for more information on how our Fabric consultancy services 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...

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