Analytics Engineering with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI

Chapter 17. Create Your Dream Fabric Architecture

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This will be the 17th chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

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We’ve spent 16 chapters building up a vocabulary. Lakehouses and warehouses, mirroring and shortcuts, Direct Lake and incremental refresh, deployment pipelines and variable libraries, naming conventions and CI/CD. Each chapter was about a capability: what it is, when to use it, what its trade-offs are. That’s the right shape for a reference, but it’s the wrong shape for what you actually do on Monday morning when a customer says, “we’d like a Fabric platform, where do we start?”

What you do on Monday morning is choose. Out of the hundred choices Fabric lets you make, you pick the dozen that fit this customer, this team, this set of constraints. The chapters before this one gave you the menu. This chapter is about the selection.

We want to be honest with you about what dream architecture means, because the phrase is a bit of a setup. There is no single dream Fabric architecture. There is no diagram we can draw that fits every customer, no template ...