Microsoft Fabric

Three strengths

• One platform. Data engineering, data integration, data warehousing, real-time analytics and Power BI sit together in one environment. 1
• One shared store. Every part of Fabric works over OneLake, a single logical data lake, so data is shared across them without moving or duplicating it. 1
• Works with Microsoft 365. Data can be analysed in Excel and shared through Teams. 1

What it is

A business's data usually passes through several tools on its way to a report: one to collect it, another to clean it, a store to keep it, and something else to chart it. Each tool has to be set up and joined to the next. Microsoft Fabric puts those steps in one place. It's an analytics platform that supports end-to-end data workflows, from data ingestion and transformation through real-time stream processing and analytics to reporting. 1

It's delivered as software as a service, which means Microsoft runs the servers underneath and you use it through a browser. 1 At its centre is OneLake, a single logical data lake (a large store for data of any kind) that every Fabric workload reads from and writes to. 1 Fabric's data engineering workload provides Apache Spark for processing large datasets, its Data Factory workload moves data in from more than 200 connectors, and its Data Warehouse stores data in the open Delta Lake format. 1

It also includes a SQL database, built on the same engine as SQL Server. 2 The reporting side is Power BI, which Microsoft calls a core component of Fabric. 3

Microsoft announced Fabric as generally available on 15 November 2023, saying it combines "the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory" as a single software as a service platform with seven core workloads. 4 At the time Microsoft reported 25,000 organisations already using it, including 67% of the Fortune 500. 4

Fabric also builds on the lakehouse idea: a lakehouse is a collection of files, folders and tables that acts as a database over a data lake. 1 Researchers describe the lakehouse as an architecture built on open data formats, with strong support for machine learning and analytics. 5

We choose it for Microsoft-based clients, where it fits the tools they already use and cuts down how many separate services have to be joined together. 1

How we use it

Fabric and Power BI are what we use together when a client is Microsoft-based. Where a client already lives in Microsoft 365 and Azure, Fabric keeps the data, the processing and the reporting in one place they already know. For larger or more varied data, we choose Databricks instead.

That's Data Solutions work, and for you it means your data feeds one set of dashboards and reports, without a patchwork of separate tools behind them.

References

1. Microsoft, "What is Microsoft Fabric?", Microsoft Learn. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/fundamentals/microsoft-fabric-overview (accessed 29 October 2026)
2. Microsoft, "What Is SQL Server?", Microsoft Learn. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/sql-server/what-is-sql-server (accessed 29 October 2026)
3. Microsoft, "What is Power BI?", Microsoft Learn. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/fundamentals/power-bi-overview (accessed 29 October 2026)
4. Arun Ulag, "Prepare your data for AI innovation with Microsoft Fabric, now generally available", Microsoft Fabric Blog, 15 November 2023. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-fabric/blog/2023/11/15/prepare-your-data-for-ai-innovation-with-microsoft-fabric-now-generally-available/ (accessed 29 October 2026)
5. Michael Armbrust, Ali Ghodsi, Reynold Xin and Matei Zaharia, "Lakehouse: A New Generation of Open Platforms that Unify Data Warehousing and Advanced Analytics", 11th Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), 2021. https://www.cidrdb.org/cidr2021/papers/cidr2021_paper17.pdf (accessed 29 October 2026)