Microsoft has declared the general availability of Microsoft Fabric, its new data analytics platform first previewed at the Build 2023 conference. The announcement, made during Microsoft Ignite 2023, marks the evolution of the service from public preview status to full readiness for enterprise use. Fabric integrates elements of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory into a seamless software as a service (SaaS) offering that is designed to significantly streamline an organization's data analytics operations.
A Unified Data Experience
At the core of the Fabric platform lies OneLake, a multi-cloud data lake engineered to consolidate business data across a myriad of clouds, accounts, and domains without replicating the information. The efficiency of Fabric stems from its architecture, which is built around seven key workloads, each catered to specific user roles and tasks within data analytics. With this approach, Microsoft aims to ease the burdens of integrating various services into one coherent and less costly system.
Future Enhancements and Adoption
Microsoft acknowledges the involvement of over 25,000 businesses in the Fabric public preview, citing financial giant Ernst and Young's feedback on its transformational impact through enhanced transparency and expedited decision-making capabilities.
An upcoming feature set to enhance the platform's versatility is Copilot, the company's generative AI tool that is capable of understanding natural language requests for tasks such as generating dataflows, coding SQL queries, designing reports, or even creating machine learning models. The Copilot feature is commencing its public preview rollout for specific Fabric components, with a full scale preview occurring by March 2024, although pricing details remain under wraps.
