Fundamentals of Microsoft Fabric

Chapter 1. What Is Microsoft Fabric?

Let’s start with one important question, What is Microsoft Fabric? Or, more specifically, Why do we need such an offering? In short, Fabric is the answer to a (if not the) challenge of our times as data professionals.

The Why and the What of Microsoft Fabric

All organizations have data: it surfaces in different formats, is constantly growing, and needs to be consumed by users to drive decisions and generate insights. Those insights need to run through different workloads, from real-time queries to analytical workloads, reporting, or AI-driven applications, as you see in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1. Requirements across an organization

Those users or personas usually have vastly different skill sets when it comes to working with data. They may not have any coding skills at all, or they may be using different languages like Python on a Spark cluster or SQL across multiple teams in an organization, as illustrated in Figure 1-2.

Figure 1-2. Skill sets across an organization

This means that to cope with new challenges and tasks, like responding to unprecedented amounts of data in real time in our data-driven world, users need to produce solutions in different ways. Organizations need to allow different users to use different tools that match their skills ...