What is Microsoft Fabric & what are the key components?

In today's data-driven world, organizations face the challenge of effectively managing and leveraging their data to drive insights and decision-making. Thibauld examines the evolving landscape of data management with a focus on Microsoft Fabric, a new platform that promises to streamline this process. This blog post will explore the features and advantages of Microsoft Fabric, offering insights into how it can transform the way businesses approach data integration, analytics, and collaboration.

What is Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-platform that brings together a variety of Microsoft data & AI tools and services under one umbrella.
It helps you collect, analyse and leverage your data more efficiently. Everyone in your team – business and IT – has the data available in one place at the same time and can use it for their own needs. It is meant to empower your businesses to make smarter, data-driven decisions.

A single platform and a single fee?

Microsoft Fabric brings together everything you need from data & AI in a single platform: from data engineering and integration to data governance and data security. It encompasses data science, real-time analytics business intelligence and AI capabilities. The platform is meant to give you a more coherent user experience, with a clear monthly fee.

What happens with Azure data products?

Microsoft Fabric will not replace any Azure data products - including Synapse and Azure SQL. You can continue to license and use tools such as Azure Synapse and Azure SQL to build your own analytics environments in Azure. However, it provides an interesting alternative, as it creates and manages the infrastructure for you. This allows you to concentrate on the data rather than on your platform and infrastructure.

What are the key components?

Power BI

Power BI lets you easily connect to your data sources, visualise and discover what’s important, and share that with anyone or everyone you want. This integrated experience allows business owners to access all data in Fabric quickly and intuitively and to make better decisions with data.

Synapse Real-Time Analytics

Synapse Real-Time Analytics is an endto-end solution for event-driven scenarios, streaming data, and data logs. It enables the extraction of insights, visualisation, and action on data in motion by handling data ingestion, transformation, storage, analytics, visualisation, tracking, AI, and real-time actions.

Data Factory

Data Factory provides a modern data integration experience to ingest, prepare, and transform data from a rich set of data sources. You can use more than 200 native connectors to connect to data sources on-premises and in the cloud.

Synapse Data Engineering

Synapse Data Engineering provides a Spark platform with great authoring experiences. It enables you to create, manage, and optimise infrastructures for collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing vast data volumes. Microsoft Fabric Spark’s integration with Data Factory allows you to schedule and orchestrate notebooks and Spark jobs.

Data Activator

Data Activator is a no-code experience in Microsoft Fabric that allows you to specify actions to launch when Data Activator detects specific patterns or conditions in your changing data. It monitors when your data hits certain thresholds or matches other patterns, and then automatically takes the appropriate action.

Synapse Data Science

Synapse Data Science enables you to build, deploy, and operationalise machine learning models from Microsoft Fabric. Data scientists can enrich organisational data with predictions and business analysts can integrate those predictions into their BI reports.

Microsoft Purview

Microsoft Purview provides a unified data governance solution to help manage and govern your on-premises, multicloud, and SaaS data. You can easily create a holistic, up-todate map of your data landscape with automated data discovery, sensitive data classification and end-to-end data lineage.

Synapse Data Warehouse

Synapse Data Warehouse provides SQL performance and scale. It separates compute from storage, enabling independent scaling of both components. Additionally, it natively stores data in the open Delta Lake format.

Need help with Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft makes starting with Microsoft Fabric fairly easy. And the free trial period allows you to discover the platform and its possibilities. But when you are beyond this discovery phase the help of a seasoned partner with a track record (we’ve got the use cases to prove it) and expertise in the matter, might come in handy. As a Microsoft Solutions Partner in data & AI and Azure we can help you on different levels and in different stages of your data journey.

If you need help with Microsoft Fabric, fill out the form below to speak with one of our experts.