Discover Microsoft Fabric, a complete cloud-based data integration and business intelligence solution from Microsoft.
As the amount of digital data available to organisations grows exponentially, data professionals are increasingly expected to be able to work with data at scale, and to be able to do so in a way that is secure, compliant, and cost-effective. The challenge is to enable organisations to use their data more effectively to allow for better and quicker decision-making. Microsoft Fabric is a collection of tools and services that enables organisations to do just that.
Discover the features and options for Microsoft Fabric and learn how to build your own data integration and Business Intelligence (BI) solution. We will look at data ingestion, integration and transformation, and explain how to deliver real-time intelligence from large datasets and streaming data. We will take a look at the AI options available with Microsoft Fabric, and explain how Microsoft Fabric pricing is calculated.
To build a scalable analytics solution across an organisation, that meets the needs of varying users can be complex, fragmented, expensive and time-consuming. With Microsoft Fabric, you don’t have to spend your time combining various solutions from from different vendors, instead you use an integrated product set that is easy to understand, set up, create, and manage. Microsoft Fabric offers personalised experiences and tools in an integrated user interface.
Microsoft Fabric’s unified data analytics platform makes it easier for data professionals to collaborate on data projects. It removes data silos and the need for access to multiple systems, enhancing collaboration between data professionals.
If you’d like to find out more about Microsoft Fabric for your organisation, then please contact us for a free discussion with one of our Certified Azure technical consultants:
What makes Microsoft Fabric unique?
Microsoft Fabric integrates Microsoft data offerings into a single stack. Many of them are built on existing tools like Power BI and Azure Data Lake Storage. Microsoft Fabric also includes capabilities from Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, and Azure Machine Learning. What makes Microsoft Fabric unique is that it brings these capabilities together in a single, SaaS integrated experience without the need for direct access to Azure resources
Microsoft Fabric includes the following services:
- Data engineering – data engineering with a Spark platform for data transformation at scale (Spark is an open-source analytics engine used for big data workloads).
- Data integration – combine Power Query with the scale of Azure Data Factory to move and transform data.
- Lakehouse & Data warehousing – flexible and scalable storage of a data-lake and data warehousing with industry-leading SQL performance and scale to support data use.,
- Real-time intelligence – live intelligence to query and analyse large volumes of data in real-time.
- Data science – data science with Azure Machine Learning and Spark for model training and execution tracking in a scalable environment
- Business intelligence – Power BI business intelligence for translating data to decisions through interactive reports and dashboards.
Getting started with Microsoft Fabric
To get started, you will need to enable Microsoft Fabric for your organisation in Resource Providers. You might need to work with your IT department to enable MS Fabric for your organisation. The permission level required to enable MS Fabric are either:
- Fabric admin (formerly Power BI admin)
- Power Platform admin
- Microsoft 365 admin
Microsoft Fabric Key Elements
Microsoft Fabric’s OneLake
OneLake is Fabric’s lake-centric architecture that provides a single, integrated environment for data professionals and the business to collaborate on data projects.
Think of it like OneDrive for data; OneLake combines storage locations across different regions and clouds into a single logical lake, without moving or duplicating data. A data lake can contain all kinds of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data.
MS Office applications are pre-wired to use your organisational OneDrive, in the same way, all the compute workloads in Fabric are pre-configured to work with OneLake.
Fabric’s data warehousing, data engineering (lakehouses and notebooks), data integration (pipelines and dataflows), real-time intelligence, and Power BI all use OneLake as their native store without needing any extra configuration
Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse
The foundation of Microsoft Fabric is a Lakehouse, which is built on top of the OneLake scalable storage layer and uses Apache Spark and SQL compute engines for big data processing.
A Lakehouse is a unified platform that combines:
- The flexible and scalable storage of a data lake
- The ability to query and analyse data of a data warehouse
Apache Spark for Data Engineering
Apache Spark is an open-source framework for large-scale data processing and analytics. This is integrated into Microsoft Fabric to provide a big data platform for analytics.
Spark can run code written in a wide range of languages, including Java, Scala (a Java-based scripting language), Spark R, Spark SQL, and PySpark (a Spark-specific variant of Python). In practice, most data engineering and analytics workloads are accomplished using a combination of PySpark and Spark SQL.
Azure Notebooks are an interactive computing environment that allows users to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations, and narrative text.
Azure Notebooks are used to write code for data ingestion, preparation, and transformation
Microsoft Fabric DataFlows & Data Factory
Data Factory empowers you with a modern data integration experience to ingest, prepare and transform data from a rich set of data sources (for example, databases, data warehouse, Lakehouse, real-time data, and more)
There are two primary high-level features which Data Factory implements: dataflows and pipelines.
- Dataflows are based on Power Query – a familiar tool to data analysts using Excel or Power BI that provide visual representation of transformations as an alternative to traditional programming.
- Data Factory Pipelines can be used to orchestrate Spark, Dataflow, and other activities; enabling you to implement complex data transformation processes.
Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric has a high degree of continuity with Azure Data Factory (ADF) and approximately 90% of activities accessible in ADF are already available under Data Factory in Fabric. In addition Data Factory in Fabric introduces some new activities to meet your richer orchestration needs. These new activities are:
- MS Outlook: Available in Fabric Data Factory to facilitate integration with Outlook services.
- MS Teams: Available in Fabric Data Factory to enable orchestration of Microsoft Teams activities.
- Dataset Refresh: this is in progress in Fabric Data Factory to enhance dataset refresh capabilities.
- Dataflow Gen2: available in Fabric Data Factory to empower data orchestration with advanced dataflow capabilities.
Real-time intelligence with Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft Fabric’s real-time intelligence offers an end-to-end solution for event-driven scenarios, streaming data, and data logs and dealing with gigabytes or petabytes of data. All of this organisational data in motion converges in the Real-Time Hub.
Time-based data is seamlessly connected from various sources using no-code connectors, enabling immediate visual insights, geospatial analysis, and trigger-based reactions.
Data science with Machine Learning
Microsoft Fabric offers data science experiences to empower users to complete end-to-end data science workflows for the purpose of data enrichment and business insights. This covers all activities across the entire data science process, all the way from data exploration, preparation and cleansing to experimentation, modelling, model scoring and serving of predictive insights to BI report.
Microsoft Fabric enables data scientists to train, evaluate, and score machine learning models by using built-in experiment and model items with seamless integration with MLflow for experiment tracking and model registration/deployment. Fabric also features capabilities for model prediction at scale (PREDICT) to gain and share business insights.
Below is a common flow of Machine Learning in Microsoft Fabric:
- Ingest data from an external data source
- Explore and clean data (using Notebooks)
- Train and register machine learning models
- Perform batch scoring and save predictions
- Visualize prediction results in Power BI

AI with Copilot and Microsoft Fabric
Once you have enabled Microsoft Copilot for Fabric (Overview of Copilot in Fabric – Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn ) for your organisation, this unlocks AI capabilities across the Microsoft Fabric suite as follows:
Copilot for Data Science and Engineering: An AI-enhanced toolset which helps as an interactive aide to lighten the load for data engineers.
Copilot for Data Factory: AI tools to generate code for data transformation
Copilot for Data Warehouse: an AI assistant which streamlines data warehouse tasks such as natural language to SQL.
Copilot for PowerBI: generate reports automatically or create summaries of your reports.
Copilot for Real-Time Intelligence: extract valuable data insights with this advanced AI tool to help you use Kusto Query Language (KQL)
Copilot for SQL database in Microsoft Fabric: an AI assistant designed to streamline your OLTP database tasks.
Microsoft Fabric Pricing
Microsoft Fabric is billed for three components as described below:
- Compute Capacity
- Storage
- PowerBI licensing
- Microsoft Fabric Capacity: Simplified purchasing with a single pool of compute for every workload that powers all capabilities in Microsoft Fabric, from data modelling and data warehousing to business intelligence and AI experiences. It is billed per SKU (capacity units) and the lowest SKU is F2 (2 Capacity Units) and the cost is £235/month (correct at time of writing this blog).
Note: Reservation pricing is available for all SKUs
Note: these prices are correct at the time of publication, but for up-to-date pricing please refer to Microsoft Fabric – Pricing | Microsoft Azure
- Storage: A single place for storage of all data formats. Billed per gigabyte (GB) and the cost is £0.0185 per GB per GB
- Power BI Licenses: Power BI report publishers and consumers will need a Power BI Pro licence. For non-Power BI publishing activities, no Power BI Pro licence is required. This means users can use pipelines, create data warehouses, use notebooks and manage their capacities without a Power BI Pro license.
Note: For F64 SKU and higher – a Premium P1 equivalent, Power BI report consumers do not require a Power BI Pro license.
What Next?
If you’d like to discuss how you could use Microsoft Fabric in your organisation, understand more about the tools and features that are included, and see the commercial aspects, then please contact us for a free discussion with one of our Certified Azure technical consultants:
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