Analytics Engineering with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI

Chapter 4. Introduction to Microsoft Fabric

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the authors’ raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 4th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Microsoft Fabric is a cloud-based platform that brings various data tools into one place. Think of it as a one-stop shop for working with data. If you are wondering why you would need an end-to-end analytics platform, imagine this:

It’s Monday morning (and let’s be honest, we are not exactly fans of Monday mornings), when your boss drops a last-minute request on your desk:

“I need a report showing sales trends, customer behavior, and product returns by lunchtime.”

Before Fabric, this request would have kicked off a whole chain reaction. You would have to message the data engineer to pull and clean the data. That task alone could’ve taken hours, maybe even days, in the past. Then you would have had to ask the data scientist to run some quick analysis on that data using a separate tool. Finally, you would have had to get the enriched data from the data scientist so you could build the report in Power BI. With so many handoffs and disconnected tools, ...