Real-Time Intelligence with Microsoft Fabric

Chapter 2. Business Intelligence Versus Real-Time Intelligence

Before you can leverage Fabric for Real-Time Intelligence, you need to gain an understanding of the fundamental differences between real-time intelligence and business intelligence. While they may seem similar, these two approaches offer distinct pathways to data-driven insights. This chapter provides a breakdown of their unique characteristics, advantages, and applications, so you can understand how each one contributes to a robust business strategy and efficient operations.

Real Time Versus Near-Real Time

It’s important to understand that in practice, real time usually means near-real time. There may be a few seconds or more of latency from the moment data is generated to when it can be acted upon. So whenever we send data from, say, a sensor on an engine up to a cloud data processing system such as Microsoft Fabric, we’ll have to wait for up to several seconds after the event occurs before we can take action on it. And the more processing of the event we do, the more latency we introduce—but we accept that it’s “close enough” to being real time. Therefore, what we deal with in Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence is always near-real-time data. By using a cloud service, we accept that there will be latency.

Also note that dashboards, which you will learn more about in Chapter 10, are event driven, and they update automatically and continuously whenever new data streams in, rather than waiting for a scheduled ...