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Microsoft Fabric: Announced

Ed Freeman By Ed Freeman Software Engineer II
Microsoft Fabric: Announced

On May 23rd 2023 (at the Microsoft Build conference), Microsoft Fabric was announced in Public Preview.

Microsoft Fabric extends the promise of Azure Synapse integration to all analytics workloads from the data engineer to the business knowledge worker. It brings together Power BI, Data Factory, and the Data Lake, on a new generation of the Synapse data infrastructure. Delivered as a unified SaaS offering, it aims to reduce cost and time to value, while enabling new "citizen data science" capabilities.

We at endjin have been involved in the private preview over the last 6 months, and are very excited to share our analysis and opinions with you all. You can find our new Microsoft Fabric entry on our Azure Radar diagram for an overview of our thinking, but we also have plenty of fresh content being released every week to keep you in the loop.

This post will be kept up to date over the coming weeks with all the content we produce. All content will be published either on the endjin blog or the endjin YouTube channel. Do follow/subscribe so you don't miss a beat!

Endjin's Microsoft Fabric Blogs

Endjin's Microsoft Fabric Videos

Official Microsoft Fabric Resources

FAQs

What is Microsoft Fabric? Microsoft Fabric extends the promise of Azure Synapse integration to all analytics workloads from the data engineer to the business knowledge worker. It brings together Power BI, Data Factory, and the Data Lake, on a new generation of the Synapse data infrastructure. Delivered as a unified SaaS offering, it aims to reduce cost and time to value, while enabling new "citizen data science" capabilities.

Also worth reading:

Intro to Microsoft Fabric

Intro to Microsoft Fabric

Ed Freeman

Microsoft Fabric is a unified data & analytics platform that brings together, and improves upon, Microsoft's existing suite of data products. It can be thought of as the third generation of Microsoft data platforms, where first generation (e.g. HDInsight, SQL Data Warehouse) were somewhat isolated takes on traditional data products; second generation was Azure Synapse Analytics, which integrated platforms at a UX level but still felt a little disjointed at the data level; and now we have Microsoft Fabric which builds upon the Synapse "unification" vision, with a particular focus on enabling deep data-level interoperability. In this post we introduce its core offerings, as well as weigh up the pros and cons of this new product.
What is OneLake?

What is OneLake?

Ed Freeman

OneLake is the core of Microsoft Fabric - it is essentially the storage account for all of your data utilized within Fabric, be that within Azure or from another cloud (through Shortcuts). As the name suggests, it is a single, logical data lake backing more or less all of your Fabric workloads. For fans of analogies: you'll have probably heard Microsoft use the tag-line "OneLake is to data what OneDrive is to files/documents". Read this blog to dive deeper into OneLake and learn about why you should be excited.
Azure Synapse Analytics versus Microsoft Fabric: A Side by Side Comparison

Azure Synapse Analytics versus Microsoft Fabric: A Side by Side Comparison

Barry Smart

In this post we compare Azure Synapse Analytics with Microsoft Fabric to understand how features map from Synapse to Fabric.

Ed Freeman

Software Engineer II

Ed Freeman

Ed is a Data Engineer helping to deliver projects for clients of all shapes and sizes, providing best of breed technology solutions to industry specific challenges. He focusses primarily on cloud technologies, data analytics and business intelligence, though his Mathematical background has also led to a distinct interest in Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, and other related fields.

He also curates a weekly newsletter, Power BI Weekly, where you can receive all the latest Power BI news, for free.

Ed won the Cloud Apprentice of the Year at the Computing Rising Star Awards 2019.