Microsoft Fabric: Collaboration Platform for Data Analytics

Guest Post by Eugene Lebedev

One recent business intelligence consulting development is the wider adoption of Microsoft Fabric. Microsoft Fabric used to be exclusively reserved for enterprise Microsoft customers. However, it has now been released to the general public at $155 per month, which makes it affordable for small and medium-sized businesses. In this blog, we will cover what Microsoft Fabric is, how it could benefit data analytics teams, and AI capabilities of the platform.

What is Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric is an online platform uniting seven Microsoft software products that used to be completely separate. However, Microsoft is actively working on integrating other software products into Fabric, including SharePoint and OneDrive. 

What does this mean in practice for Microsoft clients? Frankly, the more of those individual products you use, the bigger the impact of Microsoft Fabric is on your organization. However, if your organization only uses Power BI, the impact of Microsoft Fabric is not as significant. 

If you have a structured data team, all using Microsoft technologies and all with designated roles, you should be using Microsoft Fabric. However, if you have a data team of 1, just staying up to date with the latest Fabric development is enough. 

Let’s quickly discuss every product separately to understand the kind of workflows that Microsoft Fabric enables.

• Power BI – enables businesses to create automated management reports where their data is visualised. It is mainly used for creating graphs and user-facing analytics.

• Azure Data Factory – used by businesses to create custom automatic data extraction and transformation processes. 

•  Azure Synapse – similar to Azure Data Factory but also used by businesses to create data lakes, explore data, and build big data analytics solutions.

A separate mention needs to be made of OneLake. OneDrive is the next evolution of Microsoft OneDrive, which is a cloud-based storage for all the files in your organisation. OneLake comes automatically with Microsoft Fabric and is designed to enable customers to find all the company files in one location. You can think of it as OneDrive that also supports the outputs of the Power BI, Data Factory, and Azure Synapse workflows.

How Microsoft Fabric Enhances Collaboration

File Sharing in Parquet Format

A big challenge before Microsoft Fabric was that the data output from all the different systems was in different file formats. Microsoft Fabric standardises the data format from all the individual software products to a format called Parquet. 

Before Microsoft Fabric, a Power BI analyst might have applied some transformations to the data as part of building a management report. However, the colleagues who use Synapse or Data Factory could not connect to the resulting Power BI dataset. As a result, they had to apply the same data transformations on their side. 

This duplication of effort can now be avoided as anyone using Azure Synapse/Data Factory can consume Power BI datasets through Microsoft Fabric and vice versa. 

Shortcuts in Microsoft Fabric

Another challenge many companies have is that their tech stack is not purely built on Microsoft. Commonly, businesses store their data on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft cloud platforms at the same time. This is something that Microsoft is trying to solve using shortcuts. 

Microsoft Fabric enables users to create shortcuts that point to other storage locations (like Amazon S3, Google Cloud, and Dataverse). As a result, you can see the files stored in Amazon S3 inside your Microsoft OneLake folders. As a result, the workflows that your team is doing outside of the Microsoft ecosystem can get more visibility, enhancing collaboration further.

Microsoft Co-Pilot AI Assistant

Microsoft went beyond increasing collaboration between the technical team members of the data team. The co-pilot in Microsoft improves the collaboration between the data team and non-technical users.  

Commonly, Power BI report viewers have questions about the analysis or need to explore the data in more detail. Microsoft Co-Pilot offers a chatbot-like functionality for users to ask AI questions about the data. The Microsoft AI assistant will then create additional graphs or even whole reports based on the requests. It can also help users to format the Power BI reports to their preference with a single command.

As a result, even users with no technical skills can use the datasets from Power BI, Synapse, and Data Factory to analyse the data. You can view a demo of Microsoft Co-Pilot capabilities on YouTube if you are interested. 

Final Thoughts on Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is a powerful cloud platform helping businesses to aggregate data from their data from multiple data lakes in one place. It not only facilitates integrations between Azure Synapse, Data Factory, and Power BI but also any other software that can consume Parquet files can benefit from the collaboration in Microsoft Fabric. Reach out to Render Analytics if you are looking for an implementation partner for Microsoft Fabric or any other data-related solutions.