A Beginner’s Guide to Microsoft Fabric
What is Microsoft Fabric?
1. A unified software-as-a-service (SaaS)
OneLake provides a single, integrated platform for managing and analyzing data, eliminating the need for multiple disparate tools.
2.One platform, one system, one product, one experience, one architect, one Business Model and one united space where data experts and business teams can work together on data
Data scientists and business analysts can collaborate seamlessly within the OneLake platform to gain insights from data and make informed decisions together.
3.Using Single environment, you can ingest, store, process, and analyse, visualized, shared your data
With OneLake, you can upload raw data, perform data transformations, Allowing Machine learning Model, Visualized Data, Run SQL Queries on lake and data warehouse, and share interactive reports — all within a single environment.
4.Built on Power BI and Azure Data Lake Storage, and includes capabilities from Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, and Azure Machine Learning.
OneLake leverages the power of Microsoft’s data and analytics services, combining the strengths of these technologies to provide a comprehensive data management and analysis solution.
So, you can create a Pipeline for orchestrating for data Movement, can create experiments for training machine learning models or create a semantic Models for defining key metrics and much more
5.Centralized administration and governance across all experiences.
OneLake offers robust administration and governance features, allowing administrators to set access controls, monitor data usage, and ensure compliance across all user experiences.
6.There are two separate cost : storage and compute
OneLake provides transparent billing with separate charges for data storage and computational resources, allowing organizations to optimize their spending based on their specific needs
7.Easily share data/Report via Team meeting , Team Chat or using Presentation (.ppt with live data)
You can share real-time data and reports directly in team meetings, chat conversations, or embed them in PowerPoint presentations for seamless communication and collaboration.
8. All your data stored in a single open format in one place — OneLake
OneLake stores data in an open format like Parquet, ensuring that data is easily accessible and can be used with various analytics tools and platforms.
9. Without Moving or duplicating your data, you can access data from different region storage or different cloud storage
OneLake allows you to access and analyse data stored in different regions or cloud storage locations without the need for data migration or duplication.
10. OneLake is like a like OneDrive
Just as OneDrive simplifies file storage and sharing, OneLake simplifies data management and analysis, making it easy for users to work with data.
11. All the compute workloads are preconfigured to work with OneLake
OneLake’s compute resources are optimized and preconfigured to seamlessly interact with the data stored in the platform, ensuring efficient data processing.
12. OneLake is built on top of Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS)
OneLake leverages the scalability and reliability of Azure Data Lake Storage as its foundation, ensuring secure and high-performance data storage.
13. Any format, including Delta, Parquet, CSV, JSON, and more
OneLake supports a wide range of data formats, allowing you to work with data in the format that best suits your needs
14. Natively integrated with Microsoft Purview
OneLake seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Purview for data cataloguing and data governance, providing a comprehensive data management solution within the Microsoft ecosystem.
15. Reduced Infrastructure as code so you can fully focus on requirements and build it very quick
In essence, OneLake’s commitment to abstracting and simplifying the complexities of infrastructure management, enabling users to accelerate the implementation of their data initiatives by concentrating on what they need to achieve with their data rather than getting bogged down in infrastructure-related tasks. This approach can lead to quicker project deployment, increased agility, and a more efficient use of resources for data professionals and organizations.
16. Copilot —
It helps everyone be more productive. Weather it’s writing a SQL Statement, building reports, or setting up automations based on trigger. All your data, all your teams in one place.
What can you do in Microsoft Fabric?
- Data engineering
- Data integration
- Data warehousing
- Real-time analytics
- Data science
- Business intelligence
Who can use it?
For everyone, if you are Citizen or professional data practitioners, You can use this tool for following purpose.
- Data engineering
- Data integration
- Data warehousing
- Real-time analytics
- Data science
- Business intelligence
If you have experience with Power BI, you’ll find this quite straightforward to grasp
Why you should use Microsoft Fabric ?
The primary issues addressed by Microsoft Fabric include:
- Helps in understanding the overall compute cost of running operations in a particular experience e.g. Warehouse
- Helps to identify Capacity unit trends across all items in a particular experience e.g. warehouse items like which warehouse is taking the most compute, etc
- Help to drill down and identify more granular details like users that ran an operation or the specific operation ID for further troubleshooting Specially when admin observe that certain operations are most of their compute and how they can go about troubleshooting that
NOTE — Administrators can utilize Capacity Metrics Apps to monitor the above aspects.
Here are few more reasons to use the Microsoft Fabric:
1.Scalability
2.cost-effectiveness
3.Accessibility
4.Inbuilt feature such as monitoring
5.Maintainability, update and patching done by Microsoft
6.Centralized administration and governance across all experiences.
7.Help to break down silos in organization and provide all data in one place and Provide enough required data to Machine learning and AI
8. Quick project Deployment
9. Reduce Infrastructure as code cost
How or where to start your Journey using Microsoft Fabric?
How to set up your Account and Environment ?
To enable Fabric for your organization. The permissions required to enable Fabric are either:
- Fabric admin (Fabric Admin roles explained)
- Power Platform admin
- Microsoft 365 admin
Fabric can be enabled at the tenant level or capacity level, meaning that it can be enabled for the entire organization or for specific groups of users.
Now, you have set up account and you have internet so you can create a workspace. It must be in Premium capacity to use Fabric.
There are two options Trial or Paid one.
1. Trial option:
Free Trial:
You also can try free Trial in the Premium Capacity for trying out it initially.
- Go to https://app.fabric.microsoft.com
- Login with Microsoft Azure login or MS work or school address or create new one.
- It will pop up as shown below
NOTE — You can use work or school account or you can create account (how to setup Microsoft 365 Developer Account)
2. Paid One
Login at https://app.fabric.microsoft.com as admin and Select A License.
Now you have environment set up using Trial or Paid one So you can create Workspace and experience. In Fabric, you need to create Workspace 1st before creating any resources. So Lets Create workspace as shown in step 4.
4. Your First Workspace Creation
5. Your First Fabric — ADF experience
Now lets create your 1st Azure Data Factory experience by creating a Data Pipeline Resource as shown below
Select Highlighted option and give suitable name for Data Pipeline.
Now Add a”wait” activity to pipeline as shown below.
Execute your first Fabric Experience
Your data Pipeline have one activity. Now lets run Pipeline by clicking on “Run” Button as shown below
Useful Resources:
Environment Set UP:
Create your own Microsoft Fabric environment — Kevin Chant (kevinrchant.com)
A Beginner’s Guide to Microsoft Fabric | by alpa buddhabhatti | Sep, 2023 | Medium
Microsoft Fabric
Get started with Microsoft Fabric — Training | Microsoft Learn
https://app.fabric.microsoft.com
Metadata Driven Pipeline in Fabric
Conclusion :
Fabric experiences look similar to other Microsoft data offerings. Fabric is built on Power BI and Azure Data Lake Storage, and includes capabilities from Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, and Azure Machine Learning. What makes Fabric unique is that it brings these capabilities together in a single, SaaS, integrated experience without the need for access to Azure resources.
These days, data professionals need to handle big amounts of data while keeping it safe, legal, and budget-friendly. And businesses want to use that data to make smart decisions fast.
