Introduction

Organizations focus on using data to expand their businesses. This results in working on data architecture projects across multiple services. The Projects to execute could involve creating data lakes, data warehouses, analytics, and data workloads. There are data scientists, data engineers, machine learning engineers, and so many others in the data space. However, one challenge major organizations face in handling their data is data governance. If there's one word in the data space recently, it is data governance. Data governance involves the core aspects of managing corporate data.

Data Scientists, data engineers, data analysts, and chief data officers face these challenges when working with data:

• Data services are not on the same platform.

• Time spent managing data across different services and platforms.

• Data governance

This is where Microsoft Fabric comes in.

Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft explicitly describes Fabric as “an all-in-one analytics solution for enterprises that covers everything from data movement to data science, Real-Time Analytics, and business intelligence.”

Microsoft Fabric is a unified platform used to manage data. Microsoft Fabric is a Software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that provides accessibility to data across different services. The SaaS solution takes care of every fundamental part that goes into infrastructure, and workloads regarding data.

Fabric is called the data platform for the era of AI. Microsoft Fabric provides a low-code concept with the functionality and approach of the Power Platform. Fabric has been launched for public preview and is free to use. It has a trial license that lasts up to 60 days once it is activated on a tenant. It is built on the foundation of Power BI. The official link to access Fabric is Power BI (microsoft.com).

Microsoft Fabric is built on OneLake, which consists of:

• Data Science

• Data Engineering

• Real-time Analytics

• Data Warehouse

• Data Factory and

• Power BI.

Fabric is designed to provide a unified experience across business models via business intelligence, real-time analytics, and data integration.

OneLake

OneLake is a single, unified, logical data lake for the whole organization. OneLake is also called Microsoft Fabric Lake. OneLake provides data lake as a service.

OneLake is simply OneDrive for data. The data lake serves as the cornerstone on which the Fabric services are all constructed. It provides a single location to store all organizational data. By default, OneLake is included with every Microsoft Fabric tenant.

Data is stored in one lake and accessible by all compute, i.e. data factory, data engineering, and data analytics. OneLake is built on top of ADLS (Azure Data Lake Storage) Gen2.

Benefits of OneLake

OneLake as the foundation of Fabric has several advantages.

• Onelake provides unified storage for data across multiple platforms.

• It removes duplication of data.

• There is role-level access control for administrators managing data.

• Role-level access control provides security based on who is accessing the data.

• Onelake gives a 360-degree view of data.

Final Thoughts

Fabric is an excellent SaaS solution for data officers. Since it was announced at Microsoft Build, organizations have begun to look into the possibilities and features of Fabric. Organizations should begin to consider their computing needs, storage capacity, and costs while using Fabric. With this innovation, chief data officers do not have to be chief integration officers.

Fabric is currently a work in progress, and Microsoft will continue to provide more capabilities to improve its data services.