Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric represents an end-to-end analytical solution that combines Power BI, as a reporting platform, Data Factory, as a data integration service, as well as Microsoft Synapse Data Engineering, Data Warehousing, Data Science and Real Time Analytics. It is designed as a software as a service solution, and the data is stored within the OneLake repository, which enables the storage of structured and unstructured data…

Microsoft Fabric appeared at the end of May this year and brought a revolution in the way we store and process data. Power BI still exists and for now nothing has changed regarding licensing, but users of Power BI Free accounts are automatically “upgraded” to Microsoft Fabric Free, which in practice means that they will store data in the OneLake repository in the future, and they will also be able to use some additional services with a free preview for 60 days.

OneLake is a repository used to structured data (Data Warehouse) and unstructured data (Data Lake). The format in which they are stored is Delta Parquet. It provides an additional layer of protection as well as advanced functionality in the form of history tracking (transaction log) and a flexible way to change content by writing custom SQL queries for extracting data. This way of storing data also enables connection with data located outside the Microsoft infrastructure, for example on AWS. A year earlier, Microsoft presented Datamart, as an instance of Azure SQL server intended for storing data warehouses in the cloud, organized within the company’s tenants. Data stored on OneLake infrastructure should be retrieved much faster.

Microsoft Fabric also enables the creation of Notebooks, which represent a combination of project documentation and code. You can find additional technical characteristics on this page.

When you log in to the Power BI Free service (Microsoft Fabric Free) in the lower left corner you can see a menu with which you can choose which service you want to use.

Let’s choose Data Warehouse, and then the Warehouse (Preview) option. After entering the name of the new warehouse, a screen with options for creating and modifying data in the warehouse will appear. We can populate the data warehouse based on SQL queries, by creating Dataflow or Data pipeline.

Let’s create a new Dataflow. We will retrieve the data from the Excel file located on the OneDrive repository. We will select the Items and Transactions tables and import the data.

Next, it is necessary to combine queries, delete unnecessary columns and complete the data transformation process.

When we have created a data warehouse, we can use it to create Power BI reports. It is only necessary to enter Power BI Desktop, choose a warehouse and connect to it, and then create a report in the same way as when working with traditional datasets.

This was just a brief look at the possibilities that Microsoft Fabric offers, and believe me, it offers a lot more. Subscribe and test its functionality!