Analytics Engineering with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI

Chapter 16. Semantic Link

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s 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 16th 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].

Since Microsoft Fabric was publicly unveiled in May 2023, there has been an ocean of announcements about the new platform. Plenty of those were just a marketing or rebranding of the features and services that had already existed before Fabric. But in this ocean of announcements, some features swam under the radar, with their true power still somehow hidden behind the glamor of their “fancy neighbors.” Semantic Link is probably one of the best examples of these hidden Fabric gems.

Despite the fact that Semantic Link officially belongs to the data science workload in Microsoft Fabric, we consider Semantic Link one of the most revolutionary features in the entire Microsoft Fabric realm because it opens a whole new world of possibilities when creating a unified view of data across multiple disparate sources.

Before we get into how Semantic Link works under the hood, let us share our opinion on why you should care. In this chapter, you will see how a few lines of Python ...