Microsoft Fabric

What is Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric is a software-as-a-service analytics platform that puts data movement, engineering, warehousing, real-time analytics and business intelligence in one product. Teams work in shared workspaces rather than wiring separate services together. At the centre is OneLake, a single logical data lake for the organisation that stores tables in the open Delta-Parquet format. The Microsoft Fabric overview provides more detail on the platform’s architecture and workloads.

A brief history

Microsoft announced Fabric at Build in May 2023 and made it generally available later that year. It pulled together tools that had lived separately in Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory and Power BI. Direct Lake mode, which lets Power BI read lakehouse tables without importing a copy, came with it.

Who uses Fabric?

Data engineers build pipelines, Spark notebooks and lakehouses. Analysts and BI developers create semantic models and Power BI reports. Data architects manage capacities, workspaces and governance, often alongside Microsoft Purview.

Who should learn Fabric?

It is a natural next step for analysts and engineers coming from SQL or Power BI who want to work with lakehouses. A good starting point is T-SQL, Delta tables, DAX and OneLake shortcuts. Spark and real-time streaming can wait until those feel comfortable.