Simplifying Microsoft Fabric

The world of data analytics is rapidly growing. There are new tools, terminologies evolving meaning of which may differ from person to person. With all these tools coming from different vendors, it becomes really complex when it comes to integrating them with your current architecture. Another challenge could be upskilling of your employees to understand the new language/terminology/syntax etc. In order to tackle these common pain-points, Microsoft launched their new end-to-end data analytics tool called Microsoft Fabric.

You may be wondering why do you care about it and why am I writing about simplifying Fabric? The main reason I wanted to write this article is that when I talk to customers about Fabric, the most common feedback I get is I don’t understand Fabric. And I agree, given the features it offers, it may be overwhelming. But that’s why I am writing to provide a high-level overview of what it is (L100). Let’s dive right in!!

What is Fabric?

It's an end-to-end analytical platform that integrates everything that an organization needs for their analytical needs. From data ingestion to ETL to creating reports, it has all the tools available within one UI experience.

Fabric components

Items

Anything you create in Fabric is referred to as an item. If you create a report, pipeline, Lakehouse or Warehouse etc. all these are called items. It's the smallest individual entity with which you interact to get the job done.

Personas/Experiences

Now there are a lot of different items that one can create. To better manage the end user experience, there are personas introduced in Fabric. They are namely:

1. Data engineering: Enables users to design, build, and maintain systems for collecting, storing, processing, and analyzing large volumes of data.
2. Data warehousing: Centralized repository for storing, managing, and analyzing structured data.
3. Data factory: Data integration service that allows you to create, schedule, and manage data-driven workflows. It enables you to move, transform, and orchestrate data across various sources, including on-premises and cloud.
4. Power BI: Reporting/Business Intelligence (BI)
5. Real-time analytics: Optimized for streaming and time-series data.
6. Data science: End-to-end data science workflows for the purpose of data enrichment and business insights. You can complete a wide range of activities across the entire data science process, all the way from data exploration, preparation and cleansing to experimentation, modeling, model scoring and serving of predictive insights to BI reports.

You can create majority of the items in each persona, but few specific items will be highlighted based on the persons you are in. For example, if you are in power BI experience, you will see items to create which are more tailored towards reporting/BI.

Workspaces

This a collection of different items aimed at a specific workload or a project. Think of it as a container where all the team members can collaborate. Workspace is tied to a capacity (we will talk about capacity later).

Domains

Just like workspaces, domains are logical grouping of workspaces. This is so you can categorize and better manage stuff at a business level. For example, within an organization, sales will be a domain within which pre-sales can be a workspace.

Hierarchy of concepts in Microsoft Fabric

OneLake

OneLake is a single, unified, logical data lake designed to serve as a central repository for all your organization’s data. In other words, think of it as a single storage lake where all your data will reside. There are few features that I want to mention here:

1. Shortcuts: OneLake shortcuts allow you to create a symbolic link or shortcut (for windows users :P) from your data in other storage locations like AWS S3 to OneLake. Yes, you read that right, you do not have to duplicate the data to be able to access it. It just works automagically.
2. Mirroring: This enables accessing and ingesting data continuously and seamlessly from a database or data warehouse into the Data Warehousing experience in Microsoft Fabric.

Capacity

Its a distinct pool of resources allocated to Microsoft Fabric. The capacity size directly influences the computational power at your disposal. You assign capacity to the workspace you work with.

This wraps up the high-level introduction to Microsoft Fabric. In this article, we discussed about what Fabric is and what are its main components and features. I hope this will help you in understanding Fabric better. Please share your feedback on what would you like me to simplify next in Fabric.