- Yooo! Adam Saxton with Guy in a Cube and in this video, I want to introduce you
to Microsoft Fabric. You may be new to
Microsoft Fabric altogether or you may be coming from Power BI and wondering, what is Microsoft Fabric? I don't, I wanna know more. Microsoft Fabric is a cloud
service, so it's a platform, it's a software as a
service or a SaaS product. You may hear that word. And what it does is bring together a lot of different services
that have been out there for a while into one spot. So think of this, OneLake, when we think about Lakehouses. One security, when we think about managing items and
data, role level security, those type of items. One way to discover data, one way to manage your data and govern. These are all items inside
of Microsoft Fabric. And so before we had just Power BI, and the Power BI service
itself was very full featured from a platform perspective. We had workspaces, we had capacities, we had all of these items. And now what Microsoft is doing
is leveraging that platform and expanding it for other workloads. You may have been familiar with
or, and or have heard things like Azure Data Factory,
Azure Synapse Analytics. These items have been retooled
and taken to the next level inside of Microsoft Fabric. There are seven workloads that are defined as part of Microsoft Fabric. So we've got Data Factory, we've got Synapse Data Engineering, we have Synapse Data Science,
Synapse Data Warehouse, Synapse Real Time Analytics, Power BI, and the new Data Activator, which isn't currently available as of the time of this recording, but it will be coming to
Microsoft Fabric soon. It was demoed at the Microsoft
Build Conference where this was all announced. And so if you're coming from Power BI, this should be very familiar. The UI itself should
be very familiar to you and the concept of
workspaces and capacities and how we actually create items inside of the service itself. For those that are coming
from either Data Factory and or Azure Synapse Analytics, this will be a new experience for you as this is a SaaS service, right? So it's, it's almost
like a turnkey type item. You don't have to go provision things. They're just available for you. Back to buy capacity. That was the challenge
before Microsoft Fabric, where you had all of
these different services and you had to wire them up. It was very complicated
to actually get going. You may have been an expert
in Azure Synapse Analytics and or like a data
warehouse or a database, but you didn't necessarily
know how to use Data Factory or pipelining or those type of things. And or you may be coming from
data science and it was really hard to get your data. What did you have access to? Where was it actually located? How do you go talk to the
people that can get you what you need so you can do your job? Even on the Power BI side,
sometimes this was a challenge in terms of getting to a
database or trying to stand up a database or a data
warehouse of some kind. And working with lake data, we keep hearing about this lake concept, but where is the lake and
how do I get access to it? That's where Microsoft
Fabric really comes in. And the the beauty and the power of Microsoft
Fabric, it is lake centric and so OneLake is the
underpinning of all of this. OneLake allows for the storage
of parquet delta files. Microsoft Fabric has been
standardized on that. As a result of that, with compression and additional work that
Microsoft did to leverage some of the technologies that have been used in Power BI to make this even faster with better compression, I can reuse those across the different
workloads that are inside of Microsoft Fabric. So no longer do I have to copy data. We've just got one copy of the data. From my Lakehouse perspective, I can be using notebooks to stage and get the data in the right place. I can take it, that same data those same delta files that are in the Lakehouse or inside of OneLake. I can stand that up inside of a warehouse. I can do what I need to do to
provide transactional support and I can even create tables directly from the warehouse that will
persist inside a OneLake. And then I can take that into Power BI using the
Direct Lake capabilities and actually leverage those Delta files that are inside of OneLake. I didn't move any data. The data's just there. We can also take advantage of other things from a shortcut perspective
where we can actually leverage existing data
that may be out there, whether it's in Azure Data Lake storage. What was also presented is this ability to actually go connect to Amazon S3 storage. Maybe your data's in Amazon
Cloud, so whether it's in a different cloud, whether
it's Microsoft's Azure Cloud or it's Amazon's cloud, or you know, maybe it's Google's cloud as well, these things will be available where you can just create that shortcut. You're not moving data,
it's still where it was and I can leverage that
and create amazing reports in Power BI and or do my
data science operations on top of that. These are all capabilities
of Microsoft Fabric that it brings to the table for you. And what will be coming,
it's not available as of the recording of this video
yet, but it was highlighted at the Microsoft Build Conference, this inclusion of Copilot with
inside of Microsoft Fabric across different areas. So Copilot with inside of
Notebooks, Copilot for Power BI. These things will help you
leverage and get the most out of the product in an easy way. To get started with Microsoft
Fabric, all you need to do is head over to
Fabric.microsoft.com and sign in and or sign up if you've
not had an account already. If your organization's
been leveraging Power BI, congratulations, you've
already got Microsoft Fabric. They may need to turn that
on from a tenant perspective and or back that with capacity, but you'll have it available to you. And if you just want to
try it and get started to see what it's all about,
Microsoft Fabric comes with a free 60 day Fabric
capacity that you can leverage so that you can start learning
how to use Microsoft Fabric from Lakehouses to warehouses, using all the notebooks and dataflows. And as you get started in your
journey, there's two places that I wanna point you
to right off the bat to begin your journey. The first is the Microsoft
Fabric Learn content, where this will walk you
through what it's all about. This is a great foundational set of information that can
help you in your journey. And then also the end-to-end
tutorials that will walk you through like how to create a Lakehouse, how to create a warehouse
to start you in your journey with sample data and get
up and running quickly, leveraging that free
60 day Fabric capacity, if that's all you have. And you can bet on the
Guy in a Cube channel, we will continue to create great
content for you to help you in that journey to learn Microsoft Fabric. And we will also have courses
to help you go even deeper than what's available just
on the YouTube videos. So welcome to the Microsoft Fabric family and community, inclusive
of Power BI, of Synapse, of all of these things related to data. And this is really
something that can help your organization take your
data to the next level. For more great Fabric content,
check out this playlist up above where we're gonna
add some great content to help get you started
with Microsoft Fabric. As always, thank you so much for watching. Keep being awesome and we'll
see you in the next video.
Wait, does this mean you'll be more active on Reddit once again?!