What is Microsoft Fabric?, What does Microsoft Fabric mean for the rest of Microsoft’s Infrastructure. What questions are outstanding? This blog aims to give a brief overview of Microsoft’s new direction.
With this release Microsoft aim is to leverage the popularity of Power BI by putting this at the centre of Fabric. Power BI is a loss leader and unique part of the Office portfolio. With this strategic change Microsoft aims to use Power BI to increase popularity of other products in their portfolio.
What is Microsoft Fabric
It aims to bring all the parts from ingesting data through to visualisation into a single solution. Removing the need for other software. Microsoft Fabric merges Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics and Power BI into a single platform. Without the need to set up resources between them.
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What is OneLake?
OneLake is the central foundation of the Fabric and is described as the “OneDrive of data”. One Lake is built on top of Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 without the need to have an Azure account. It is able to support structured and unstructured data and store them as delta parquet format.
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What is Delta Lake?
Delta Lake is a layer which sits over Parquet files. This is an open-source project created by the DataBricks company. The key benefit of it being open-sourced means that other tools can work with your data in your One Lake.
What parts exist in Microsoft Fabric?
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Synapse Data Engineering
A spark platform enabling data engineers to perform large scale transformations.
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Data Factory
Combining data factory with power query to enable data to be ingested via data flows and data pipelines.
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Synapse Data Science
Allows integration with Azure Machine Learning.
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Synapse Data Warehouse
Provides SQL performance and scale, whilst storing data in delta-lake format.
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Synapse Real-Time Analytics
Enabling the use of observational data including semi structured data.
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Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is Microsoft’s data visualisation technology.
What are the outstanding questions?
Whilst it was launched with some fanfare there are some outstanding questions regarding the Fabric offering and the Microsoft strategy as a whole.
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Will there be changes?
It should be noted that Fabric is in Preview, there will be a lot of changes as it evolves.
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What happens to Synapse?
Synapse was sold as a one stop shop for data analytics. Though Microsoft will sell this as an evolution of synapse it could be seen as another attempt at this concept.
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Where does this leave my Databrick projects?
Many will want to stick with the Databricks projects due to the investment already undertaken. It looks at this stage that integrating OneLake with data bricks could be the path clients will adopt.
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Does it have Version Control?
Many see the version control as a weakness of the Microsoft estate. Git integration is a positive step and the plan is to role Git out to all Fabric artifacts.
Conclusion
We have given a brief overview of Microsoft’s new direction. It is going to interesting to watch it evolve and see how the questions are answered. Contact us if you to discuss how we can support you on this journey.
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Blog Posted by David Laws
