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What is Microsoft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that spans everything from data movement to data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence. It offers a comprehensive set of services, including data lake, data engineering, and data integration, all in one place.
With Fabric, you don’t need to cobble together disparate services from multiple vendors. Instead, you can enjoy a highly integrated, end-to-end, easy-to-use product designed to simplify your analytics needs.
The platform is built on Software as a Service (SaaS), which takes simplicity and integration to a whole new level.
Microsoft Fabric brings together new and existing components of Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Azure Data Factory into a single, integrated environment. These components are presented in several tailored user experiences.
Fabric brings together experiences such as Data Engineering, Data Factory, Data Science, Data Warehouse, Real-Time Analytics, and Power BI on a shared SaaS basis. This integration offers the following benefits:
- Access to a wide range of deeply integrated industry analytics.
- Shared experiences in familiar and easy-to-learn experiences.
- Developers can easily access and reuse all assets.
- A unified data lake that lets you keep data where it is while using your preferred analytics tools.
- Centralized administration and governance across all experiences.
- With the Microsoft Fabric SaaS experience, all data and services are seamlessly integrated. IT teams can centrally configure key enterprise capabilities, and permissions are automatically enforced across all underlying services. Additionally, data sensitivity labels are automatically inherited across package items.
Fabric enables creators to focus on producing their best work, freeing them from the need to integrate, manage, or understand the underlying infrastructure that supports the experience.
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Microsoft Fabric Components
Microsoft Fabric offers a comprehensive set of analytics experiences designed to work together seamlessly. Each experience is tailored to a specific persona and task. Fabric includes industry-leading experiences in the following categories to meet an end-to-end analytics need.
- Data Engineering: The Data Engineering experience offers a world-class Spark platform with great authoring experiences, enabling data engineers to perform large-scale data transformation and democratize data through the lakehouse. Microsoft Fabric's Spark integration with Data Factory enables Spark notebooks and jobs to be scheduled and orchestrated.
- Data Factory: Azure Data Factory combines the simplicity of Power Query with the scale and power of Azure Data Factory. You can use over 200 native connectors to connect to data sources on-premises and in the cloud.
- Data Science: The Data Science experience enables you to seamlessly build, deploy, and operationalize machine learning models within your Fabric experience. It integrates with Azure Machine Learning to provide experiment tracking and embedded model logging. Data scientists have the ability to enrich organizational data with predictions and enable business analysts to integrate these predictions into their BI reports. This shifts from descriptive insights to predictive insights.
- Data Warehouse: The Data Warehouse experience delivers industry-leading SQL performance and scale. It completely separates compute from storage, enabling independent scaling of both components. It also stores data natively in the open Delta Lake format.
- Real-Time Analysis: Observational data, which is collected from a variety of sources such as applications, IoT devices, human interactions, and more. It is currently the fastest growing category of data. This data is typically semi-structured in formats such as JSON or text. It comes in high volumes with variable schemas. These characteristics make it difficult for traditional data storage platforms to work with. Real-Time Analytics is the best-in-class engine for analyzing observational data.
- Power BI: Power BI is the world’s leading business intelligence platform. It ensures that business owners can quickly and intuitively access all the data in their Fabric to make better decisions with their data.
Fabric brings all of these experiences together on a unified platform to deliver the industry’s most comprehensive big data analytics platform.
Microsoft Fabric enables organizations and individuals to transform large, complex data stores into actionable workloads and analytics, and is an implementation of the data fabric architecture.
OneLake and lakehouse “towards the unification of lakehouses”
The Microsoft Fabric platform unifies OneLake and Lakehouse architecture across enterprises.
- OneLake
The data lake is the foundation on which all Fabric services are built. Microsoft Fabric Lake is also known as OneLake. It is integrated with the Fabric service and provides a unified place to store all the organizational data that experiences run on.
OneLake is built on Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2. It provides a single SaaS experience and tenant-wide data store that caters to both citizen and professional developers. The OneLake SaaS experience simplifies experiences by eliminating the need for users to understand any infrastructure concepts such as resource groups, Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), Azure Resource Manager, redundancy, or regions. Additionally, there is no requirement for the user to have an Azure account.
OneLake eliminates the current chaotic, pervasive data silos that individual developers create when they provision and configure their own isolated storage accounts. Instead, OneLake provides a single, unified storage system for all developers, where data discovery and sharing are trivial, and compliance with policy and security settings is centrally and uniformly enforced.
- OneLake and lakehouse organizational structure
OneLake is hierarchical in nature to simplify management across your organization. It is integrated with Microsoft Fabric and there is no requirement for any upfront provisioning. There is only one OneLake per tenant and it provides a single-pane-of-glass file system namespace that spans users, regions, and even clouds. Data in OneLake is divided into manageable containers for easy manipulation.
The tenant maps to the OneLake root and is at the top level of the hierarchy. You can create any number of workspaces within a tenant, which can be thought of as folders.
The following image shows the various Fabric items where data is stored. This is an example of how multiple Fabric items would store data within OneLake. As shown, you can create multiple workspaces within a tenant and create multiple lakehouses within each workspace. A lakehouse is a collection of files, folders, and tables that represents a database in a data lake.
Each developer and business unit in the tenant can instantly create their own workspaces in OneLake. They can ingest data into their own lakehouses and start processing, analyzing, and collaborating on the data, just like OneDrive in Office.
All Microsoft Fabric compute experiences are pre-connected to OneLake, just as Office applications are pre-connected to use your organizational OneDrive. Experiences such as Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, Data Factory, Power BI, and Real-Time Analytics use OneLake as their native storage. They do not require any additional configuration.
OneLake is designed to allow you to instantly mount existing PaaS storage accounts to OneLake with the Shortcut feature. There is no need to migrate or move any of your existing data. Using shortcuts, you can access data stored in Azure Data Lake Storage.
Additionally, shortcuts allow you to easily share data between users and applications without moving or duplicating information. The shortcut feature extends to other storage systems, allowing you to compose and analyze data across clouds with transparent, intelligent caching that reduces egress costs and brings data closer to compute.
Fabric Solutions for ISVs
(independent software vendor)
If you are an ISV interested in integrating your solutions with Microsoft Fabric, you can take one of the following paths, depending on the level of integration you want to achieve:
- Interoperability – Integrate your solution with OneLake Foundation and establish basic connections and interoperability with Fabric.
- Build on Fabric – Build your solution on top of the Fabric platform or seamlessly embed Fabric functionality into existing applications. This allows you to actively leverage Fabric capabilities.
- Build a Fabric Workload – Build custom workloads and experiences on Fabric. Tailor your offerings to deliver your value proposition by leveraging the Fabric ecosystem.
Unlock the potential of Copilot
Microsoft Copilot is an exceptionally powerful tool designed to significantly improve your productivity and efficiency across a variety of tasks. If improving your effectiveness is a priority, Copilot stands out as an excellent choice.
