11 months ago

At Microsoft’s https://build.microsoft.com/ conference in Seattle today, the software and cloud giant announced the public preview of Microsoft Fabric, the company’s new end-to-end analytics platform. And though all of the precursor services on the Azure side have been available as separately-billed Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings, Microsoft Fabric unifies them under a single Software as a Service (SaaS) capacity-based pricing structure, with a single pool of compute for all workloads within the scope of the platform.

I say this as someone who participated in the early adopter’s program for Fabric and who has used Microsoft data and analytics technology for almost 30 years.

The inclusion of Power BI in Microsoft Fabric goes beyond its own capabilities and provides integration with Microsoft 365 (read: Office) by extension.

When working with data in Microsoft Fabric, a BI engineer doesn’t have to decide whether to import the data into a Power BI model or leave it in OneLake and query it on the fly.