Microsoft Fabric introduction

Microsoft Fabric is the next version of Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Explorer, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI. It brings all of these capabilities together into a single unified analytics platform that goes from the data lake to the business user in a SaaS-like environment. Therefore, the vision of Fabric is to be a one-stop shop for all the analytical needs for every enterprise and one platform for everyone from a citizen developer to a data engineer. Fabric will cover the complete spectrum of services including data movement, data lake, data engineering, data integration and data science, observational analytics, and business intelligence. With Fabric, there is no need to stitch together different services from multiple vendors. Instead, the customer enjoys end-to-end, highly integrated, single offering that is easy to understand, onboard, create and operate.  

This is a hugely important new product from Microsoft and I will simplify your understanding of it via a presentation and demo.

Agenda:
What is Microsoft Fabric?
Workspaces and capacities
OneLake
Lakehouse
Data Warehouse
ADF
Power BI / DirectLake
Resources

[rwhpjng]

I want to say a big thank you for incredibly useful and easy explanations. Well done.

[alt-enter]

This was incredibly helpful! I am prepping to teach the DP-500 and one of the things I am trying to figure out is how to compare/contrast/talk about "traditional" Synapse vs. Fabric. Your insights really help!

[Anbu_Sampath]

Nice talk to understand the high-level how all connected together and compare with existing offering.

[vantuandang]

Once again, Great and useful video!
Thank you James!

[DanielWillen]

If you were to create a shortcut to a CSV file, right now it seems that you have to manually create the table, and it does not update if the source file changes. It's quite common that we have folders in the datalake containing versions of a csv. Sales_01, Sales_02 etc. In serverless sql you could just target them with openrowset and an asterisk. Sales_* would just load all the files in the folder. And since it was a view you would always gaurantee the data was not stale. Are there plans to improve the way data is loaded as tables in the lakehouse to support this?

[vt]

Finally, I understood the whole buzz around Fabric. Main differentiators from Synapse look like SaaS | OneLake | Dropping MPP aka Dedicated Pool | Compute/storage decoupling (official) |...plue few more. I am not sure how well "Auto discovery and registration of table" feature will work - specially if metastore already exists in Databricks. Will Databricks share its metastore with Fabric or we will recreate metastore here? Also, will metastore be at workspace level or tenant level?

[thomasgremm]

Hi James, thanks for the good introduction! Good insights into the architecture of Fabric/OneLake.

Will it be possible to use data virtualization as a layer between on-premise SQL Server 2022 and OneLake (maybe, in conjunction with the new feature Shortcuts). I remind myself, that SQL Server 2022 is able to use the Polybase v3 feature in conjunction with ADLSv2 access (virtually), but since OneLake is somehow extra/segregated from ADLSv2, I doubt that it will be possible, at the moment.
A workaround for me would be to data virtualize between on-premise and ADLSv2, and then shortcut/"bridge over logically" to OneLake (hosted in Fabric capacity).
Thanks in advance!

[linpaws]

Does MS Fabric supports things like Private connections to on-prem, key vaulted credentials/configs like Azure does? Is it something we can expect to see in future if not there already?

[Nilsp]

Hi James, first of all, great video!

Most of our current dashboards are built on Tableau which connects to our SQL database. If we moved to Fabric and used OneLake, would we still be able to connect to Tableau?

[ljfcugh]

How can I get access to the links on the presentation?

[cternove]

“things i like behind me” for some reason i thought to myself he likes printers 😂 … jk this is a great video Thank you!

[keenfive]

I hope we are fine as long as we don't use (Synapse) Data Flow activities.