Microsoft Fabric

Introduction to Microsoft Fabric

Source: Training session by Microsoft on 2025-09-08

Use case

Need to analyze data in different data sources and provide reports for various user needs

Analytics capabilities: Data integration, engineering, warehouse, real time analytics, data science, business intelligence

Fabric Features

Microsoft Fabric integrates analytics capabilities using secure technologies with governance and service management. It is compatible with AI platforms and open data lake. “Like Microsoft Office” and Software as a Service (SaaS) for data by managing data sources to users.

Fabric features:

Data extraction, loading, transformation: Data Factory
- Connectors provide integration, built in transformations
Real time intelligence
Databases
- Encryption enabled
Analytics: data engineering, warehouse, data science with AI Models, Synapse
- Apache Spark for pipelines
- Machine learning
Data visualization and analytics: PowerBI
AI: Copilot
Data storage: OneLake, Data warehouse
Governance, Security, Compliance: Purview
Infrastructure: compute and storage is shared by workloads, billing by usage in Microsoft Fabric capacity

For infrastructure (Fabric capacity), capacity management is centralized and allows scaling and cost management. It is defined in capacity units (CUs) which is compute power. See Fabric Licensing

Users and developers have access to graphical user interfaces (GUI), low code, and programmming interfaces.

Demonstrations

Central interface in Fabric to access all its features.

Create workspaces, manage databases, pipelines, and other Fabric items
Create a new item, select a semantic model for use in a new report.
Use monitor to track activities like pipeline runs and their details
Admin: manage settings, users, logs
Security and privacy settings and viewing in Purview
Data storage: create lakehouse and choose connector/shortcut to data sources. Example, use shortcut to link to AWS S3 images. OneLake integrates with Windows like OneDrive. Add tables from a databases into the data lake
- Allows integration with SQL, notebooks
- Assign relationships, row level security
Users: can access tables for PowerBI reports, manage table relationships and DAX queries and then create a report.
- AI Copilot can help with data analysis for report creation and answer questions on data
- Reports can be shared and exports to Microsoft Office

Managing Fabric Items

Data integration options
- Shortcuts: referencing data sources without copying
- Mirroring: read only replication to data lake
Access levels:
- Platform
  - Domain
    - Workspace
      - Compute
      - Item level access
Generative AI
- Monitoring of data, user interactions