The last few decades have seen a paradigm shift in the way we access and consume information as users have become accustomed to interactive, on-demand, and accessible data. This shift has been powered by the cloud, big data, streaming data ingestion, and innovative end-user analytic tools. While the industry has continued to evolve there have been significant challenges in bridging the gaps between all of these offerings, ultimately leading to unfulfilled promises.
Last week, Microsoft had one of their most significant Build Conferences in many years. We are excited to finally share with you what we believe will revolutionize how data analytics is approached for years to come — Microsoft Fabric. Microsoft Fabric is a re-envisioning of Azure Synapse, Power BI, and the data lake that has been several years in the making. It is a next-generation solution that combines the best aspects of Microsoft’s data and analytics products into a single platform on a unified open storage medium. It is difficult to sum up how significant this announcement is, as it impacts every area of the modern data & AI stack. The core components of Fabric include:
- Data Factory: A modern data orchestration and transformation platform with Pipelines and Dataflows gen. 2 built using the familiar Power Query experience.
- Synapse Data Engineering: A data engineering experience centered on the lakehouse with Spark notebooks and other tooling for designing, building, and maintaining large-volume data systems.
- Synapse Data Warehousing: A SQL-centered experience with a serverless data warehouse on top of open parquet files in Delta configuration.
- Synapse Data Science: An end-to-end data science experience with new tooling such as Data Wrangler to help accelerate modeling and experimentation with data and machine learning.
- Synapse Real-Time Analytics: A Data Explorer and KQL-focused experience that simplifies and enables real-time streaming data ingestion.
- Power BI: All the great features of Power BI and Premium tightly integrated into the full Fabric experience.
- OneLake: A single unified logical data lake for the whole organization—no need to create and maintain multiple data lakes—with central security and governance.
By bringing together all of these experiences under a single solution Microsoft is simplifying design, development, maintenance, and the user experience. We highly encourage you to dive deeper by watching these announcement videos:
- Data analytics for the era of AI https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/852ccf38-b07d-4ddc-a9fe-2e57bdaeb613
- Modernize your data integration to enable petabyte scale analytics with Microsoft Fabric https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/e066311e-4232-49b2-9066-615a184bf749
- Using Spark to accelerate your lakehouse architecture with Microsoft Fabric https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/0ea5599b-e4f3-42d2-a103-6b008ee8c05c
- Modernize your Enterprise Data Warehouse & generate value from data with Microsoft Fabric https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/aed14ea3-3356-4d15-92c7-2c24efd55f7c
- Models to outcomes with end-to-end data science workflows in Microsoft Fabric https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/f73d3a46-fa77-49bf-a704-be81e6c15aa2
- Real Time analytics – Sense, analyze, generate insights with Microsoft Fabric https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/d3bec9f4-b706-40f6-85b6-47e5b1194716
- Empower every BI professional to do more with Microsoft Fabric https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/8b23c96e-7c35-463d-88b4-564d23dc14a5
- Secure, govern and manage your data at scale in Microsoft Fabric https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/b35ec76d-c6ee-4c71-ad28-7b3210a7f6be
Eager to learn more? Reach out to schedule a consultation with our team.