Microsoft is planning to announce a new data platform called Microsoft Fabric. Details about the upcoming Microsoft Fabric data platform got leaked online today. Microsoft Fabric offers four main capabilities, read about them in detail below.
First, Fabric is a complete analytics platform which is built as one unified product with integrated experience and delivered as a SaaS offering similar to Power BI.
Second, Microsoft Fabric supports a lake centric and open architecture called OneLake. OneLake is like OneDrive for Data. Microsoft is completely moving away from proprietary data formats into open data formats so that enterprises don’t have to worry about lock in. Right now, AWS, Snowflake and Google do not support open data format. So, this is going to be a huge selling point for Microsoft. Microsoft believes that eventually all these big tech analytics offerings will support open formats.
The data stored in OneLake will be automatically indexed for discovery, MIP lables, PII scans, sharing, governance and compliance. Also, once provisioned automatically with the tenant, all the workloads will automatically store their data in the OneLake workspace folders.
As you can see from the screenshot above, OneLake data will be shared by all the workloads including Data Factory, Power BI, Synapse services and the new Data Activator service.
Third, the data available in the OneLake can be delivered directly to business users via PowerBI and the familiar Microsoft Office applications.
and… PowerBI pic.twitter.com/hQ5cwCrzll
— WalkingCat (@_h0x0d_) May 10, 2023
Fourth, Fabric is powered by Azure OpenAI service allowing you to unlock full potential of your data. With Copilot integrated into every data experience, you can use natural language to analyze and get insights about your data. Copilot can even turn your words into data flows and data pipelines so you can integrate data from anywhere. When you are writing functions, copilot can offer code suggestions and even write functions for you. You can also use Copilot to create reports with stunning visualizations.
Find the demo video of Copilot in Microsoft Fabric below.
Microsoft Fabric……. eh, Copilot? 🙃 pic.twitter.com/18GWqduL15
— WalkingCat (@_h0x0d_) May 10, 2023
At launch, Microsoft Fabric will have the following seven workloads:
- Data Factory:Â For data integration, connection to hundreds of data sources, bring data together, cleanse it and get ready for analytics.
- Synapse Data Engineering:Â A brand new spark experience that will delight developers who build notebooks and work with their data.
- Synapse Data Science:Â A brand new data science experience powered by Azure ML.
- Synapse Data Warehousing:Â A brand new data warehouse that supports incredible scale and supports completely open formats.
- Synapse Real Time Analytics: A real time analytics engine that can analyze massive amounts of data coming from IoT of devices.
- Power BI: Improved Power BI that is deeply integrated into Microsoft Fabric data platform.
- Data Activator:Â A brand-new new product