All Your Data Analytics Needs in One Place

Would You Like To Have All Your Analytics Components In One Place?

Microsoft Fabric can be described as a unified analytics platform and is an evolution of several existing Microsoft analytics products, consolidated into a single administrative environment and licensing model which makes licensing, development, and administration much simpler. Getting started with Microsoft Fabric might seem a little daunting.

Current Microsoft Azure and Power BI-based Data Analytics & BI solutions may look like one of the following high-level architectures or any hybrid of the two.

Traditional Data Warehouse to Tabular Model to Dashboard architecture as above or more complex Machine Learning, NoSQL DB and dashboards.

Your current BI solutions are likely to have some or all of the following platform components:

• Azure Blob Storage

• Azure Data Lake

• Data Factory

• Azure Synapse

• Azure SQL Database

• Azure SSAS

• Azure VMs

• Power BI Pro

• Power BI Premium PPU

• Power BI Premium Capacity

• Azure Databricks Azure Cosmos DB

• Power Automate

• Logic Apps

And across those platform components might be some or all of the following object components:

• Power BI Dataflows

• Power BI Shared Datasets

• Azure SSAS Tabular Models

• Power BI Reports

• Power BI Paginated Reports

• SSRS Reports

• Data Warehouse - relational star schema database

• Azure Blob Storage Containers

• Azure Data Lake Containers

• Machine Learning or AI Databricks

• Cosmos DB NoSQL Database

• Automated and triggered tasks

Microsoft Fabric pulls the majority of these components together into a single space but also adds new functionality to some of your familiar Azure and Power BI services.

Fabric v Power BI

All the existing components of Power BI remain much as they are:

• Dataflows – Automated data collection and transformation process

• Datasets – Shared Semantic Models that can serve multiple reports

• Reports – Data visualization - Reports published and accessed via the powerbi.com service.

Fabric offers some valuable additional features that will be of great benefit to maintaining the existing Power BI components, including:

• DevOps Integration – Version Control - Fabric workspaces can be integrated with Azure DevOps so datasets and reports can be checked in for version control and change management

• Larger Model support - Fabric capacities can be used to maintain larger models (>1GB) whilst still enabling users to access this content under their standard Pro license (or no user license at all if capacity >F64)

• Browser-based development - All aspects of the Power BI process, including modelling and visualization, can now be accomplished entirely within the browser making development much more accessible and eliminating the need for desktop tools to be installed.

Fabric v Azure Data Platform

Within Fabric you will now have a single Fabric workspace environment for all your BI components:

• Data Factory Pipelines

• Data Lake

• Data Warehouse - Dedicated Pool

• Data Warehouse - Serverless Pool

• Power BI Dataflows and Datasets

• Spark Notebooks

• Machine Learning Models

Many of the traditional core BI solution components have been unified into a single entity:

• Data Factory – now combining Power Query with traditional Data Factory: Power Query dataflows can now be fully integrated within data factory pipelines with over 200 native connectors

• OneLake – a unified, logical data lake for the entire organization: A common governance layer over workspaces that enables top-down administrative visibility. Makes a single set of data accessible to a variety of toolsets without the need for duplication

• Data Warehouse – high-performance analytics: A fully functional Read/Write T-SQL database engine with distributed computing to support large-scale analytics workloads

• Data Lakehouse – rapid access to data: A virtual data warehouse that maintains parquet file-based storage in OneLake with a read-only SQL endpoint to enable querying of the data directly within the lake.

Data Activator is currently in preview at the time of writing (check the latest Microsoft documentation for current status) but it will enable actions to be fired automatically based on data-driven triggers.

Other new components, such as Data Science and ReaReal-Timel Time Analytics will be available in the same environment should those opportunities present themselves in your BI journey.

How Do You Migrate From an Azure Solution to a Fabric Solution?

Migrating from your current Azure and Power BI-based business intelligence solution will require careful consideration and planning. Microsoft Fabric is new and evolving.

• Only just out of preview, there is some functionality that you will have enjoyed in the Azure Data Factory, Synapse and Power Premium world that are not yet available in the Fabric world, and this may require some interim handling on your migration journey to switch to new methods as they become available.

• Your team may need to acquire some new skills to execute the migration work.

• Being new it may be a bit of a journey into the unknown with regards to how much a move to the Fabric platform will cost you.

• You may not yet need all the benefits that Fabric can bring to a data analytics solution

• A new platform will benefit from a complete review of your current solution and future aspirations to ensure that full advantage is taken of the Fabric features and services

Take a look here for more information on migrating to Microsoft Fabric.

Fabric Key Skills

With new platform releases comes the challenge of developing new skills to design, implement and maintain solutions built around these new solution architectures.

The skills required to develop and maintain the new Fabric environment will be nearly identical to those currently in use but will be available within a single common interface to make them much more accessible.

Our Microsoft Business Intelligence, Fabric and Power BI Training Courses will help you prepare for your Fabric Data Journey.

Source Applications and Data

Connecting to and consuming data from source systems will require technical knowledge of the individual platforms, as well as a logical understanding of the data in those systems and its business value

Orchestration

• Data Factory – Developing pipelines and dataflows to transfer data

• Transact SQL – Developing stored procedures to perform data transformation

Data Warehouse

• Logical design – Star schemas

• Querying and Optimising – Transact SQL

Semantic Modelling - DAX

• Relationships

• Hierarchies

• Measures

Report development and Visualisation – Power BI

• Dashboards

• Paginated Reports

• Insights & Data-Driven Decision Making

How Can PTR Help?

Migrating to a new platform, or embarking on a new data journey on a new platform, can be daunting. Do you even need to implement a Fabric solution, or is it overkill for you? Our Fabric Consultancy service can help you assess your requirements and first identify what your data journey might look like. Our consultants are all passionate about designing and implementing the perfect solution for our clients and that means that we do not take a "one size fits all" approach. We will work with you to assess what you currently have and where you would like to be. From there we will use the extensive experience across our entire team of consultants and solution architects to come up with the right solution for you. Building a successful, robust, performant and future-proof BI and Data Analytics solution requires careful consideration of:

• Your organisation's overall Data Strategy, Data Governance & Security Strategy

• The available human resources, level of interaction in delivering the project, and skill levels

• Existing BI components already in place

• Data sources to be consumed

• Dashboard and reporting requirements

• Future requirements

• Budget

• Timeline for delivering the solution

We often find that it is best to break solution delivery down into smaller Milestones so that you have a regular delivery of visible outputs giving early confidence that the solution will satisfy your needs and rapidly making data available for your data-driven decision-making requirements. Smaller milestones also create regular touch points that allow a review of the approach - particularly important when embarking on solutions built around new and emerging platforms such as Microsoft Fabric. Our mentoring approach to working with our clients means that we take you and your team along with us every step of the way on your data journey, ensuring that you can be self-sufficient in taking your solution forward once implemented.

While considering your options for a Fabric solution it can be helpful to learn a little more about the platform and architecture choices available to you. Equipping your team with the knowledge and skills they require, and building their confidence to implement a successful BI solution is key to a successful project so you may also want to consider complementing consultancy and mentoring with training to help you answer the question "Where Do I Start?".

How to get started?

Existing Power BI Premium customers can simply turn on Fabric through the Power BI admin portal. Since July 1, 2023, Fabric has been enabled for all Power BI tenants.