Overview:
Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprise needs, encompassing data handling, data science, Real-Time Analytics, and business intelligence. Its extensive range of services includes data lake management, data engineering, and data integration, all within a single platform.
Fabric eliminates the need to piece together different services from multiple vendors. You can enjoy a highly integrated, streamlined, and user-friendly system that streamlines analytics workflows.
Microsoft Fabric platform is built on a Software as a Service (SaaS) framework, elevating simplicity, and integration to unprecedented levels.
Component of Microsoft Fabric:
- Data Engineering: The Data Engineering experience offered by Microsoft Fabric provides Spark platform. This empowers data engineers to execute extensive data transformations at a scale and democratize data accessibility through the Lakehouse. Microsoft Fabric Spark seamlessly integrates with Data Factory, allowing for the scheduling and orchestration of notebooks and Spark jobs.
- Data Factory: Azure Data Factory merges the ease of Power Query with the scalability and capabilities of Azure Data Factory. With over 200 native connectors, it facilitates connections to both on-premises and cloud-based data sources, providing flexibility and accessibility for data integration tasks.
- Data Science: The Data Science experience within Microsoft Fabric streamlines the process of building, deploying, and operationalizing machine learning models within the Fabric environment. It seamlessly integrates with Azure Machine Learning, offering built-in capabilities for experiment tracking and model registry. This integration enhances collaboration and efficiency throughout the machine learning lifecycle.
- Data Warehouse: The Data Warehouse experience within Microsoft Fabric offers industry-leading SQL performance and scalability. It features a fully separated compute and storage architecture, allowing for independent scaling of each component. Furthermore, it natively supports storing data in the open Delta Lake format, enhancing data integrity and reliability.
- Real-Time Analytics: Observational data, sourced from various applications, IoT devices, human interactions, and more, represents the fastest-growing category of data. This data is often semi-structured, in JSON or text formats. This data arrives in high volume with changing schemas. Traditional data warehousing platforms struggle to effectively handle such data. Real-Time Analytics is best in class engine for observational data analytics.
- Power BI: Power BI is the world’s leading Business Intelligence platform. It ensures that business owners can access all the data in Fabric quickly and intuitively to make better decisions with data.
OneLake:
OneLake serves as a unified, centralized, logical data lake for comprehensive organizational needs. Similar to OneDrive, OneLake seamlessly accompanies every Microsoft Fabric tenant, offering a singular repository for all analytical data requirements. Its key benefits include:
- One data lake for the entire organization.
- One copy of data for use with multiple analytical engines.
OneLake Features:
- Open at every level: OneLake is an open platform built on Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2, capable of handling any type of data – structured or unstructured. It automatically stores all data in Delta Parquet format. Whether data is loaded into it via Spark by a data engineer or through T-SQL by a SQL developer for a fully transactional data warehouse, it all contributes to the same data lake. OneLake supports ADLS Gen2 APIs and SDKs, ensuring compatibility with existing applications, including Azure Databricks. Essentially, it provides a unified storage solution for the organization, with workspaces appearing as containers and different data items as folders within those containers.
- OneLake file explorer for Windows:OneLake functions as the “OneDrive for data”. It offers a user-friendly experience for Windows users through the OneLake file explorer. This explorer facilitates effortless navigation of workspaces and data items, enabling tasks such as uploading, downloading, and modifying files in a manner like Office applications. With the OneLake file explorer, interacting with data lakes becomes straightforward, catering to both technical and nontechnical business users.
- One Copy of data:OneLake maximizes data value without duplication or movement. It eliminates the need for copying data across different engines or breaking down silos for comprehensive analysis with data from diverse sources.
- Shortcuts connect data across domains without data movement: Shortcuts in OneLake simplify data sharing across teams and applications without unnecessary duplication. They create references to data stored in various locations, within or outside OneLake, making files and folders appear locally accessible regardless of their actual storage location.
Usama Saleem
Junior Consultant