Fabric Espresso: Microsoft Fabric Introduction

Welcome to our Fabric Espresso miniseries! In this video, Stijn and Filip discuss Microsoft Fabric and what will they build using it in the following episodes.

Microsoft Fabric is an enterprise-level, all-in-one analytics solution that covers a wide spectrum of needs, from data movement to data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence. It provides a comprehensive suite of services including data lakes, data engineering, and data integration, all in a single place.

One of the main advantages of Fabric is that it eliminates the need to piece together different services from various vendors. Instead, it offers a highly integrated, end-to-end product that is designed to make your analytics needs simpler. The entire platform is built on a Software as a Service (SaaS) foundation, pushing the boundaries of simplicity and integration.

A notable feature of Microsoft Fabric is the seamless integration of new and existing components from Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Azure Data Explorer into a single environment. These components span various experiences like Data Engineering, Data Factory, Data Science, Data Warehouse, Real-Time Analytics, and Power BI, all shared on a SaaS foundation. This unified approach provides extensive and deeply integrated analytics, shared experiences that are easy to learn, simplified access and reuse of all assets for developers, a unified data lake, and centralized administration and governance across all experiences.

Microsoft Fabric also incorporates OneLake, also known as Microsoft Fabric Lake, a unified location for all organizational data storage. OneLake is built on top of ADLS (Azure Data Lake Storage) Gen2 and is designed to serve both professional and citizen developers, offering a single SaaS experience and a tenant-wide store for data.

OneLake is designed to eliminate data silos, providing a single, unified storage system for all developers where data sharing is straightforward and policy and security settings are enforced uniformly. The hierarchical nature of OneLake simplifies management across organizations, and it doesn't require any up-front provisioning.

Another interesting feature of OneLake is the "Shortcut" feature, which allows instant mounting of existing PaaS storage accounts into OneLake without the need to move or migrate any existing data. This feature also extends to other storage systems, allowing data composition and analysis across clouds with transparent, intelligent caching to reduce egress costs and bring data closer to compute.