With services like Azure AI Foundry, you can not only access generative AI, but build your own agents, tailor-made for your use cases. Creating these custom AI experiences requires data—lots of it. Data is the foundation on which AI is built, and the simple fact is AI is only as good as the data it’s based on. As you enter a future built on AI, you need a data estate capable of fueling AI innovation across your organization. This can be a challenging prospect for most organizations whose data environments have grown organically over time with specialized and fragmented solutions.

That’s why we introduced Microsoft Fabric and Microsoft OneLake, Fabric’s unified data lake. With OneLake, you can access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single data lake that spans the entire organization. OneLake can act as the central, accessible location for comprehensive data access and management.​ And once connected to OneLake, your teams can use the array of data and analytics tools in Fabric to integrate, transform, model, and prepare your data for any AI project—all in a pre-integrated and optimized SaaS environment.

Today we are going to focus on why Fabric and OneLake are the ideal data tools to fuel your AI projects in AI Foundry. First, we will talk through how you can unify your data estate on OneLake, then cover how Fabric’s workloads can help you prepare your data for AI projects. Finally, we’ll show you how easy it is to connect OneLake to Azure AI Foundry so you can start building data-driven agents in seconds.

Unifying your data estate on OneLake

For teams tasked with building new AI solutions, finding and accessing the necessary data across a sea of disconnected data services can be challenging at the best of times. To lay the foundation for long-term success, organizations need a more unified, flexible data estate based on a lake-centric approach. The right data lake foundation can help you unify all of your multi-cloud sources and allow your data professionals to work from the same data—reducing data duplication, improving collaboration, and streamlining analysis.

OneLake is designed as the single point to discover and explore data for everyone in your entire organization. You can unify all of your multi-cloud and on-premise sources using zero ETL shortcuts and mirroring in OneLake without data duplication or movement. Alternatively, you can leverage the 180+ connectors in Fabric Data Factory to move your data in from any other source. OneLake is automatically wired into every Fabric workload and since data is stored in an open format, you can use data in OneLake for all your data projects, no matter the vendor or service. You can also save time and reduce data duplication by loading data into OneLake only once and using a single copy across every Fabric engine and even other engines like from Snowflake.

Once enabled in OneLake, you can use domains and the OneLake catalog to organize your data into a logical data mesh and empower everyone to easily explore, manage, and govern their data. Take a look at the OneLake catalog:

Preparing and curating your data for AI projects

For generative AI solutions to be as accurate as possible, they need to be built with clean data and in a semi-structured way. You’ll need an analytics platform that can help you prepare your data before building custom AI experiences. ​With your data in OneLake, you can use Fabric’s various workloads to make the data AI-ready. Fabric has tools for data integration and engineering, data warehousing, data science, real-time analytics, data modeling and visualization, and even has native, industry-specific and partner-created workloads to help you accelerate your data projects.

All Fabric workloads work together seamlessly out-of-the-box without the myriad of infrastructure and configuration settings you typically find in data platforms, so you can focus on getting results. Advanced security, governance, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities are woven into the platform with personalized experiences for admins and users alike. Copilot in Fabric and other AI capabilities are built into every layer of Fabric to help data professionals and business users automate routine tasks and get more done. Fabric also comes with category-leading performance, instant scalability, shared resilience, and built-in security, governance, and compliance so you can feel confident using Fabric for your mission-critical workloads.

Connecting OneLake data to AI products

Now that your data is AI-ready, you need to connect it to your AI platforms like Azure AI Foundry to build and scale data-driven GenAI apps. We’ve built native integration between OneLake and Azure AI Foundry to make this as seamless as possible. Azure AI Foundry can operate directly on OneLake, opening endless possibilities for AI and app developers, data engineers, data scientists, and business users to interact using natural language to uncover insights from their data.

Azure AI Foundry

Azure AI Foundry is a platform designed to empower your developers, AI engineers, and IT professionals to customize, host, run, and manage AI solutions with greater ease and confidence. Similar to Fabric, Azure AI Foundry’s unified approach simplifies the development and management process, helping all stakeholders focus on driving innovation and achieving strategic goals. It’s designed to help your developers build more technical, customized AI solutions.

The integration between Azure AI Foundry and OneLake is built on the same shortcut technology that allows you to virtualize data in OneLake from your cloud sources like Amazon S3 and Google Cloud without having to move and duplicate the data. You can immediately work with your structured and unstructured data from OneLake in Azure AI Foundry without creating copies and adding more data sprawl. OneLake also directly integrates with Azure AI Search, which can store, index, and retrieve data, including vector embeddings, from your data sources including OneLake. 

Finally, you can ground your Azure AI Agent’s responses with data from Fabric using Fabric data agents to unlock powerful data analysis capabilities. Data agents (formally known as AI skills) in Fabric are AI-powered assistants that can learn, adapt, and deliver insights, allowing users to interact with the data through chat. With out-of-the-box authorization, this integration simplifies access to enterprise data in Fabric while maintaining robust security, ensuring proper access control and enterprise-grade protection. Check out this full demo:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/SBsErGew1yE?feature=oembedUsing data agents in Fabric as knowledge sources in Azure AI Foundry

Popular applications for data-driven agents

This seamless integration offers many opportunities for generative AI use cases across various industries, including:

• Enhancing data insights: Build agents that can help your business users explore and better understand critical data using natural language from structured, unstructured, and real-time data.
• Analyzing customer interactions: Build agents trained on your customer interaction data to enhance customer service, tailor support responses, and make data-driven decisions. These agents can detect language, summarize content, analyze sentiment, and convert insights into vector embeddings for future access in search queries.
• Customizing machine learning models: Tailor models to specific business needs, whether it’s predictive maintenance, fraud detection, or customer sentiment analysis. Azure AI Foundry, Azure Machine Learning, and Microsoft Fabric empower developers and data scientists to create custom models that fit their business requirements, grounded on their enterprise data in OneLake.
• Department-specific agents: Build agents that automate budget and expenses, increase up-sell and conversion opportunities, and improve operational efficiency
• Industry-specific agents: Build data-driven agents to streamline operations and manage OEE in manufacturing, optimize logistics and interact with customers in retail, and reduce patient-practitioner contact time in healthcare.

Ready to learn more?

Unlock a realm of new possibilities for your organization in the era of AI with the integration of Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI. Explore the potential, innovate, and thrive in the new digital landscape.

 If you want to learn more about these tools, consider:

• Signing up for the Microsoft Fabric free trial.
• Visiting the Microsoft Fabric website.
• Visiting the Azure AI Foundry website.

The post Build data-driven agents with curated data from OneLake appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

As you transition, we want to help ensure you keep access to all your data and can continue your existing work. That’s why we previously announced that you have 90 days to access your data in Power BI while you transition. Based on your feedback, we are also providing free Power BI Premium capacity for the first 30 days after the end of your previous subscription. The amount of free capacity will match the amount offered by your previously purchased P-SKU. This should reduce the need to pay for two capacities at the same time.  

How does the migration work?

As you transition to Fabric, you will need to migrate from your existing Power BI Premium capacity to a new Fabric capacity. To migrate, all you need to do is reassign your workspaces to the new Fabric capacity. We’ve even created an automated migration tool to help accelerate the process, which is especially useful if you have thousands or even hundreds of thousands of workspaces. This automated migration tool can help you programmatically migrate using Fabric REST APIs. Learn more about the manual and automated ways to migrate your workspaces here.  

What will happen at the end of my grace period?

After 30 days of free capacity, your operations will begin to be throttled and your jobs could be delayed or even rejected. Learn more about Fabric’s throttling policy. However, you will still have access to your Power BI workspaces and data if you need additional time to migrate to a F-SKU.  

After 90 days, you may lose access to your Power BI data. If you need more time, please contact your Microsoft account representative or Microsoft partner as soon as possible.  

Once you’ve migrated your data, you should delete your Power BI Premium capacities that are no longer in use. If these capacities are not deleted, operations will be slowed after 30 days, and the capacities will be frozen after 90 days and eventually deleted.  

Next steps toward transitioning to Microsoft Fabric

As you approach the end of your current agreement, create a plan to purchase Fabric and migrate your workspaces. You can view your Fabric capacity pricing options on the Fabric pricing page and get detailed instructions on how to purchase Fabric on the Buy a Fabric subscription documentation on Microsoft Learn. Please contact your Microsoft sales representative or partner to learn when you need to switch to a Fabric SKU and how we can support your smooth transition. 

Frequently asked questions

When do I have to transition to Microsoft Fabric?

Depending on your existing agreement, the retirement will impact you differently: 

• New customers can no longer purchase Power BI Premium per capacity. 
• Existing customers without an Enterprise Agreement (EA) will need to replace their Power BI Premium capacity subscription purchase with the purchase of Fabric capacity at the end of their agreement. 
• Customers with an existing EA agreement can continue to renew their Power BI Premium capacity purchase annually until the end of their EA agreement. However, at the end of their agreement, they will have to transition to Fabric capacity once the agreement has ended to continue using Microsoft Fabric. 
• Customers on a sovereign cloud will not be impacted by this retirement as they do not currently have access to Microsoft Fabric. We will provide additional information as soon as it’s available. 

What are the benefits of Fabric products?

Customers that migrate their purchase to Fabric capacity will enjoy a range of additional benefits. Fabric capacity is eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) which means Fabric customers can apply their Fabric spend against their MACC commitment. Additionally, Fabric capacity customers will get access to features only available in Microsoft Azure, like trusted workspace access and Managed Private Endpoints, which are critical components for supporting secure and private data access. These features are native to Azure and not available to Power BI Premium capacity customers. See all Microsoft Fabric products available in your Azure region on the Microsoft Fabric pricing page.    

Can I access Microsoft Power BI Embedded and Power BI Report Server from Fabric?

For Power BI Embedded, Fabric capacity is compatible with Power BI Embedded and can be used to run all of your embedded activities. Read the blog “Power BI Embedded with Microsoft Fabric” for more information. 

Power BI Report Server is now included with Fabric 64 SKU Reserved Instance purchases. You can get the Power BI Report Server key in the “Fabric Capacity” tab under “Capacity Settings” in the admin portal. It’s also available with Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise core licenses with software assurance. Learn more about ways to get the Power BI report server key here. 

Will I still need a Power BI Pro license to publish Power BI content?

Yes, this requirement will extend to Fabric capacity. Power BI report publishers and consumers still need a Power BI Pro license. However, for Fabric 64 SKU—a Power BI Premium P1 equivalent—or larger capacities, report viewers can view content with only a Fabric free license if the content is hosted in the capacity. Additionally, for non-Power BI activities, no Power BI Pro license is required.

The post Grace period for transitioning from Power BI Premium to Microsoft Fabric appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Microsoft Fabric has embraced this mission by integrating multiple products and services needed for an end-to-end analytics and AI solution, redefining existing processes to make them simpler and more intuitive. It has significantly simplified how one interfaces with such a comprehensive solution by creating a turnkey software-as-a-service experience that is easy to use with a much simpler and singular capacity usage model.

At Ignite 2024, Fabric took another bold step forward by adding operational databases to the Fabric portfolio with SQL database in Fabric. Adding operational data alongside Fabric’s analytical OLAP (Online Analytics Processing) data and real-time streaming data (RTI) opens a host of new scenarios for AI agentic applications. It also provides our customers with a unified data estate where consistent security and governance policies can be applied.

SQL database in Fabric leverages the proven mission-critical SQL Server database engine. It applies the core principles of Fabric to make deploying and managing an operational database simpler, more autonomous, secure by default, and optimized for AI. For example, deploying and configuring a database only requires a name, and the database is ready in seconds. It is secure by default with encryption at rest and in transit enabled. Networking security is also enabled via Private Link, and high availability and zone redundancy are automatically configured. 

SQL in Fabric includes native AI capabilities like support for vector and RAG (Retrieval-augmented Generation). You can also make calls directly to Azure AI services from the database and connect your database to Azure AI Foundry, VSCode, and GitHub for an integrated developer experience. In addition, you will find Microsoft Copilot integrated into every workload in Fabric including SQL in Fabric, simplifying administrative and management tasks for the databases. 

Beyond just the OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) database, Fabric introduces new agentic AI application scenarios by providing access to real-time streaming data from IoT sensors, alongside your system of record with SQL in Fabric and other data sets securely stored in OneLake. 

OneLake is at the heart of enabling a unified data estate. OneLake is built on top of Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 and can support any type of file, structured or unstructured. All Fabric data items like data warehouses and lakehouses store their data automatically in OneLake in Delta Parquet format. With the addition of SQL database in Fabric you now also have access to your mirrored SQL data in OneLake and mirroring data in Fabric is free. 

Fabric also provides a rich ecosystem to support agentic AI applications using your operational data. Changes from your data can be seamlessly sent to Azure OpenAI for business recommendations using Fabric Real-time Intelligence Eventstream, Spark, OneLake, and Power BI. 

This unification of data is incredibly powerful, enabling dynamic improvements to customer prompt responses and proactive, personalized offers. From a security standpoint, Fabric can enable consistent data protection from when the data is born to business insights via PowerBI. The same goes for data governance. 

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the number of new scenarios that Fabric can enable by creating a unified data estate. SQL database in Fabric is just the first Azure Database to be added to Fabric, with more Azure Databases to follow, so stay tuned.

Get started today

SQL database in Fabric is simple, autonomous, secure, and optimized for AI. We highly encourage you to try it today and see how you can build new AI apps faster and easier than ever! 

Learning with Fabric

We have multiple resources to help you and your teams swiftly ramp up on SQL database in Fabric: 

• Explore the documentation and build with our end-to-end tutorials.

• Skill up with the new Fabric Databases learn modules.

• Watch new Data Exposed episodes.

• Watch the new Microsoft Mechanics episode.

• Get the latest product news here on the Fabric updates blog.

• Check out an AI chatbot application example built on SQL database in Fabric. 

Fabric Community Conference Vegas: A must-attend event for database professionals! Be sure to take advantage of the discount code MSCUST for $150 off the registration price. 

FabCon Vegas is the perfect opportunity to connect with experts and data leaders to build your skills with Fabric Databases and Azure Databases and see how your peers are implementing their solutions. 

• Microsoft Fabric Community Conference March 31^st – April 2^nd, in Vegas! Workshops will also be available on March 29th, 30th, and April 3rd, making this the most comprehensive Microsoft Fabric learning experience to date.

• SQL pros can take advantage of a dedicated track for SQL in Fabric Databases and Azure Databases. 

• Connect with product specialists for 1:1 support in the Ask the Experts area. 

• You’ll get endless opportunities all week to engage with the Fabric and data communities through sessions, thoughtful discussions, attendee mixers, and interactive activations. 

• In touch with your Microsoft account team? Ask them if they have any special discounts to share.

Database experts at FabCon

• CVP of Azure Databases: Shireesh Thota, speaking at the event¹.

• Sessions from the Microsoft Databases Product team: Rie Merritt, Bob Ward, Mazuma Zahid, Erin Stellato, Davide Mauri, and more.

• Sessions from Database Community MVPs: Joey D’Antoni, John Morehouse, Monica Rathbun, Denny Cherry, Karen Lopez, Anthony Nocentino, Erwin de Kreuk, Warwick Rudd, Kelly Broekstra, Heidi Hasting, and Hamish Watson.

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¹speakers subject to change

The post The art of simplifying the complex: Microsoft Fabric’s superpower appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

In this blog, we’ll lay out the latest and greatest of our curated Fabric skilling paths on Microsoft Learn to help your team drive transformative business outcomes. We’re also announcing a new certification exam available with a 50% discount! And of course, we’ll dive into our exciting upcoming in-person event, FabCon, where we’ll have even more surprises in store, plus a chance for you to connect with industry experts and the larger data-analysis community. Let’s get started!

Get certified as a Fabric Data Engineer

Learning Microsoft Fabric equips aspiring engineers with skills to streamline workflows, handle large-scale data processing, and integrate advanced AI tools. As a Fabric Data Engineer, you’ll have the chance to design and manage cutting-edge data solutions that move AI-powered insights. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce the general availability of our new certification for Fabric Data Engineers. 

By earning your Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification, you’ll be equipped with an industry-recognized credential to set you apart in the growing field of data and AI. But you don’t have to do it alone. We’ve convened two live and on-demand series of expert-led walkthroughs to help you either get started with Fabric or build on your existing skills. Designed with Fabric Data Engineers in mind, these Microsoft Fabric Learn Together sessions (available in four time zones and three languages) are intended to give you the knowledge and confidence to ace your certification exam and take your data engineering career to the next level.

Want to explore the ins and outs of Fabric on your own time? We also have an official plan on Microsoft Learn featuring everything you’ll need to learn to pass the DP-700 Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification exam, including: 

• Describe the core features and capabilities of lakehouses in Microsoft Fabric.

• Use Apache Spark DataFrames to analyze and transform data.

• Use Real-Time Intelligence to ingest, query, and process streams of data.

• And much more! 

There’s more: For a limited time, you can get 50% off the cost of the DP-700 Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification exam. To be eligible, either attend one of the Learn Together sessions, complete the Plan on Microsoft Learn, or have previously passed the DP-203 exam. You have until March 31, 2025, to request the discount voucher, so get started fast-tracking your data engineering career today!

Join a community of Fabric users and experts at FabCon Las Vegas 

No matter your role or skill level, you can connect with other Fabric users and experts at the Fabric Community Conference from March 31-April 2, 2025, in Las Vegas. Join us at the MGM Grand for the ultimate Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, SQL, and AI event featuring over 200 sessions with speakers covering exciting new Fabric features and skilling opportunities. 

Connect one-on-one with community and product experts, including a dedicated partner pre-day, all-day Ask-the-Experts hours, a bustling expo hall, and plenty of after-hours social events. Workshops will also be available on March 29th, 30th, and April 3rd, making this the most comprehensive Microsoft Fabric learning experience to date. 

Don’t miss out! Register today to grab the early bird discount and use code MSCUST for $150 off registration. 

Build AI apps faster with SQL databases in Fabric 

Fabric’s capabilities and versatility are always expanding. We recently introduced a public preview of SQL databases to make building AI apps faster and easier than ever. SQL Database in Microsoft Fabric provides a unified, autonomous, and AI-optimized platform that accelerates app development by up to 71%, empowering businesses to innovate faster and gain a competitive edge in the AI era. 

To enhance your skills in working with SQL databases in Fabric, we’ve designed a new learning path called Implement operational databases in Microsoft Fabric. This course will guide you through the process of creating and managing SQL databases within the Fabric environment. You’ll also learn how to provision an SQL database, configure security settings, and perform essential database operations.

The course covers important topics such as data modeling, query optimization, and performance tuning specific to Fabric’s SQL capabilities. By completing this learning path, you’ll gain hands-on experience with Fabric’s SQL features and be better equipped to design and implement efficient database solutions.

You can also watch on-demand sessions of a recent SQL Database in Fabric Learn Together series to see how to build reliable, highly scalable applications where cloud authentication and encryption are secured by default. 

Unlock AI-ready insights and transform your data 

There’s always more to discover on Microsoft Learn, including a plan to help you harness AI and unify your intelligent data and analytics on the Fabric platform. With the Make your data AI-ready with Microsoft Fabric plan on Microsoft Learn, you’ll find out how to implement large-scale data engineering, build a lakehouse, and explore warehouse solutions.

This free, curated, and self-paced plan guides you through key learning milestones:

• Ingesting data through shortcuts, mirroring, pipelines, and dataflows. 

• Transforming data using dataflows, procedures, and notebooks. 

• Storing processed data in the lakehouse and data warehouse for easy retrieval. 

• Exposing data by creating reusable semantic models in Power BI, making transformed data accessible for analysis. 

Kick off your data and AI journey at Microsoft Learn 

If you’re looking to expand your Microsoft Fabric expertise and accelerate your professional development, we have everything you need:

• Get started on the path to becoming a Fabric Data Engineer Associate with our official plan on Microsoft Learn: Get Certified! Become a Fabric Data Engineer.

• Attend one of the Microsoft Fabric Learn Together sessions.

• Request a 50% discount voucher for the DP-700 Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification exam.

• Connect with Fabric experts at the Fabric Community Conference from March 31-April 2, 2025, in Las Vegas.

• Enhance your skills in working with SQL databases in Fabric with the Implement operational databases in Microsoft Fabric learning path.

• Harness AI to unify your data and analytics with the official plan on Microsoft Learn: Make your data AI-ready with Microsoft Fabric.

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The post Power your AI transformation with Microsoft Fabric skilling plans and a certification discount appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Businesses face the challenge of deploying next-generation applications across hybrid data estates with an ever-growing volume of data spread across diverse environments including from on-premises operational systems, software as a service (SaaS) applications running in multiple public clouds, events from edge devices, objects in file storage, messaging queues, and beyond. As companies increasingly rely on AI and real-time analytics to drive innovation, the ability to seamlessly integrate, process, and analyze this data with low latency has become more critical than ever. The need for a modernized data infrastructure that can support massive data volumes and deliver intelligent, actionable insights at the speed of business is essential.

Striim and Microsoft—Partnering for success with Open Mirroring in Microsoft Fabric

To meet the growing demands of modern data infrastructure, Striim has deepened its longstanding collaboration with Microsoft to offer a new mirroring solution based on Open Mirroring that avoids complex Extraction Transformation Loading (ETL) to transform how businesses manage, integrate, and analyze their data. At the heart of this collaboration is Microsoft Fabric, which is a comprehensive, unified data platform supporting an open format data that combines everything from data integration, analytics, real-time intelligence, business intelligence, and now operational databases. All of these services are supported by Microsoft OneLake, a unified intelligent storage layer that addresses the challenges of decentralized data teams working in silos.

With its fully managed service built on Microsoft Azure, Striim enables businesses to continuously deliver fresh, real-time transactional data into Fabric for seamless, low-latency analytics and AI. As a key data integration partner for Microsoft Fabric, Striim plays a critical role in bridging the gap between siloed data environments, ensuring businesses can harness the full potential of their data with speed and precision.

Mirroring operational SQL data with SQL2Fabric-Mirroring

SQL2Fabric-Mirroring is a new managed mirroring service now available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, developed in collaboration with Microsoft Fabric product teams. This streamlined, automated solution offers a cost-effective, low-latency approach to unifying data from diverse systems into a single analytics platform. Powered by Striim’s real-time data streaming capabilities, SQL2Fabric enables on-premises SQL databases to continuously replicate transactional data directly into Fabric OneLake, ensuring that data is fresh, consistent, and ready for analytics, AI, and decision-making.

Mirroring delivers the operational data into an open, analytics-ready Delta Lake table format. SQL2Fabric Mirroring provides flexibility and scalability, enabling businesses to replicate data seamlessly from multiple sources, without being locked into proprietary formats.

SQL2Fabric Mirroring solution highlights

• On-premises support: Easily replicate on-premises SQL Server transactional data (versions 2012 and up) into Microsoft Fabric.
• Low-latency analytics and AI: Striim’s platform is simple and user-friendly, designed for real-time analytics and AI workloads with minimal delays.
• Automated data and metadata synchronization: Streamline initial snapshot load, ongoing synchronization, and automated schema creation and evolution.
• High log throughput: Efficiently handle large datasets with high-speed log reading interfaces and fast snapshot loads.
• Data transformation and intelligence: Perform inline data enrichment, transformations, vector embedding detection, and protect sensitive data using language models like OpenAI (available in Striim Cloud Enterprise).
• Azure Marketplace availability: Enjoy a free 30-day trial and access the monthly managed service with built-in security, compliance, and data protection for mirroring data from on-premises SQL Server to a mirrored database in Fabric OneLake.

In addition to the SQL2Fabric-Mirroring solution, Striim Cloud Enterprise Solution also extends the mirroring capability to other sources such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and additional databases, NoSQL, and messaging and storage systems. 

Unlock real-time data and AI with Striim and Microsoft Fabric

Striim and Microsoft Fabric provide a powerful solution for real-time data integration, enabling organizations to continuously capture and consolidate data across systems with sub-second latency. Striim’s scalable streaming service transfers data into Microsoft Fabric, where it is centralized in OneLake, a unified multicloud data lake. Striim’s distributed architecture supports vertical and horizontal scaling, leveraging multithreading and parallel pipelines to process large-scale data efficiently. This ensures the solution can adapt to increasing workloads while maintaining low latency. Organizations gain immediate access to up-to-date data for analytics and AI applications, streamlining migration and improving decision-making with real-time insights.

Striim enhances Microsoft Fabric by supporting Change Data Capture (CDC) from popular sources like SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB, and Stripe, ensuring continuous data availability. This integration provides a seamless flow of data into Fabric, where its Real-Time Intelligence and Real-Time Hub tools facilitate rapid data ingestion, transformation, and analysis, empowering businesses to leverage real-time AI insights for smarter decisions.

By centralizing data in OneLake, organizations gain a unified platform for AI-powered strategies, boosting operational efficiency and accelerating time-to-market. With tools like Microsoft Copilot and the Workload Development Kit, users can quickly build machine learning models, generate code, and gain actionable insights, helping businesses stay competitive in a fast-evolving, data-driven world.

Modernize your data strategy today

Ready to unlock the full potential of your data and modernize your operations? Discover how Striim and Microsoft Fabric can streamline your data processes, accelerate AI adoption, and enhance decision-making. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your organization transform its data strategy with real-time analytics and AI.

To get started today, visit the SQL2Fabric-Mirroring page on the Azure Marketplace.

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The post Mirroring operational data for the AI era with Striim and Microsoft Fabric appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

A Leader in Data Integration 

We feel that Microsoft’s acknowledgment in the Gartner Magic Quadrant reflects our dedication to innovation and customer-centric solutions. This stems from our relentless drive to advance technology and address the ever-evolving needs of modern organizations.

Our vision for data integration is to deliver seamless, intuitive experiences that empower businesses to unlock the full potential of their data and achieve transformative results. This recognition reinforces our dedication to leading the evolution of data integration and delivering unparalleled value to our customers and partners worldwide.

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Microsoft Fabric: Unified Data Platform for the Era of AI 

At the core of our data integration strategy is Microsoft Fabric. Built to navigate the complexities of modern data ecosystems, Microsoft Fabric provides an all-in-one, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform with AI-powered services to handle any data project—all within a pre-integrated and optimized environment. It enables organizations to unlock their data’s full potential, drive innovation, and make smarter decisions. Features like Copilot and other generative AI tools introduce new ways to transform and analyze data, generate insights, and create visualizations and reports in Microsoft Fabric.

Microsoft OneLake: The heart of our Data Integration journey 

At the center of our Fabric is OneLake, the unified, open data lake that simplifies and accelerates data integration across diverse systems. OneLake, with the data integration capabilities of Fabric, is designed to help you simplify data management and reduce data duplication. OneLake’s open data format means you only need to load the data into the lake once and you can use the single copy across every Fabric workload and engine. It acts as the central hub, ensuring seamless connectivity, accessibility, and collaboration for all your data needs. 

OneLake has four innovative pathways for integrating data depending on your needs: 

1. Fabric Data Factory 

Fabric Data Factory integrates seamlessly with OneLake, offering powerful cloud-scale services for data movement, orchestration, transformation, deployment, and monitoring. These capabilities enable organizations to tackle even the most complex ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) scenarios, unifying data estates, streamlining operations, and unlocking the full potential of their data.

2. Multi-Cloud Shortcuts

OneLake shortcuts allow you to virtualize data into OneLake from across clouds, accounts, and domains—all without duplication, movement, or changes to metadata or ownership. This capability allows organizations to access and analyze their data in place, without the need for complex data migration processes. By maintaining a live connection to the source, OneLake ensures real-time data availability and consistency across all integrated environments. You can shortcut data from Azure Data Lake Service, S3-compatible sources, Iceberg-compatible sources, Google Cloud Platform, Dataverse, and more.

3. Database Mirroring 

OneLake offers an innovative zero-ETL approach to database mirroring, simplifying the replication of operational databases into the lake. This capability minimizes the effort required to synchronize databases, supporting real-time changes and ensuring that data is always current and ready for analytics and reporting.

4. Real-Time Intelligence 

Real-time intelligence in Microsoft Fabric empowers organizations to ingest and process streaming and high granularity data instantaneously, driving real-time insights and automating decision-making. This solution is ideal for applications requiring immediate data updates, such as IoT analytics, fraud detection, and operational dashboards. The capability extends to highly granular data analytics, allowing businesses to track a single package within a global delivery network or monitor a specific component in a manufacturing machine across a fleet of factories worldwide, enabling precise insights and optimized operations. Leveraging cutting-edge data processing frameworks, Eventhouse ensures scalability, reliability, and low-latency performance, making it suitable for high-volume streaming scenarios.

With these innovative pathways, Fabric empowers organizations to break down data silos, optimize workflows, and unlock the full potential of their data. Whether it’s through seamless data integration, real-time insights, or multi-cloud collaboration, Fabric is designed to meet the demands of modern data ecosystems. These enriched features position Fabric as a critical tool for organizations aiming to unlock the full potential of their data while maintaining simplicity, security, and scalability.

Customer success stories 

Our customers’ success stories are a testament to the impact of Microsoft Fabric. Organizations across various industries have leveraged our data integration capabilities to unlock new opportunities, drive innovation, and achieve their business goals. By streamlining data processes and improving data quality, Microsoft Fabric has enabled these businesses to make data-driven decisions with confidence. 

Read UST Global’s case study to learn how they leveraged the power of Fabric to migrate over 20 years of data, integrating disparate data sources to facilitate better collaboration and innovation among employees. 

Looking ahead: The future of Data Integration with Microsoft Fabric 

As we celebrate being recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the fourth consecutive year in a row, we are motivated to push the boundaries of what’s possible in data integration. To us, this is a milestone that reflects not only our commitment to innovation but also our dedication to empowering our customers to turn their data into actionable insights.

Looking forward, the roadmap for Microsoft Fabric is filled with exciting enhancements and new features. These advancements are designed to tackle the complexities of modern data ecosystems, making it even easier for organizations to unify, transform, and harness their data at scale. Continuous improvement is at the core of our strategy. We aim to remain at the forefront of the data integration landscape and redefine the possibilities of what a comprehensive data platform can achieve. 

We believe this recognition by Gartner is a validation of the trust our customers place in us and a reflection of our relentless drive to deliver world-class solutions. As we continue this journey, we remain committed to collaborating with our community and partners, building on this success to achieve even greater outcomes together.

Resources 

• Read the full complimentary report from Gartner. 
• Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric  
• Data Factory Overview 
• Real Time Intelligence 
• Transforming Your Business With Real-Time Intelligence 
• Getting Started with Microsoft Fabric  
• What’s new and planned for Data Factory in Microsoft Fabric  
• FAQ 

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, By Thornton Craig, Sharat Menon, Robert Thanaraj, Michele Launi, Nina Showell, 3 December 2024 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product, or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally, Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. Available here.

The post Microsoft: A leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant report appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

There’s a lot of exciting developments in the world of Fabric, so in this blog we’ll introduce new features, events, and the new Plan on Microsoft Learn, “Make your data AI ready with Microsoft Fabric,” designed to help you and your team unlock Fabric’s full potential for transformative insights. Let’s get going! 

Build AI apps faster with the new Fabric Databases  

By simplifying complex data processes and eliminating the need to rely on multiple solutions, Microsoft Fabric helps businesses harness data for smarter decision-making and a competitive edge. This advantage becomes crucial in the drive to build resilient, scalable AI applications that need intuitive and autonomous databases that provision in seconds. That’s where our new Fabric Databases comes in.  

A truly unified data platform, Fabric Databases unites transactional and analytical workloads that instantly make available SQL data for Fabric to scrutinize. As the first database engine to land on Fabric, SQL database is built on the same industry leading SQL Server engine, only now on a simple and intuitive software as a service (SaaS) platform. With Fabric Databases, your team can build reliable, highly scalable applications where cloud authentication and encryption are secured by default.  

To help you explore all that Fabric Databases have to offer, we’ve begun a series of live sessions with database experts to demonstrate just how easy it is to get started. View the schedule and register for the series here. 

Develop your Fabric expertise with a new Plan on Microsoft Learn  

Whichever career path you’re pursuing, you can start preparing for your certification exams now with our new Plan on Microsoft Learn dedicated to Fabric.  

The “Make your data AI ready with Microsoft Fabric” Plan is designed to help you harness AI to unify your intelligent data and analytics on the Fabric platform, guiding you through key learning milestones:  

• Ingesting data through shortcuts, pipelines, and dataflows. 

• Transforming data using dataflows, procedures, and notebooks. 

• Storing processed data in the lakehouse and data warehouse for easy retrieval. 

• Exposing data by creating reusable semantic models in Power BI, making transformed data accessible for analysis. 

Join a community of Fabric users and experts at FabCon Las Vegas 

Excited to try Fabric Databases, and want to see what other innovations we have in store? Join us at FabCon Las Vegas from March 31 to April 2, 2025, for the ultimate Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, SQL, and AI community-led event. Whatever your role, attendees at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference can look forward to in-depth explorations and demos of the latest updates, including: 

Don’t miss out! Register today to grab the early bird discount and use code MSCUST for $150 off registration. 

Data professionals prove their skills at Fabric and AI Learning Hackathon 

As we look forward to the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference, the Microsoft Fabric and AI Learning Hackathon is wrapping up with an exciting finish. Since September, 2024, IT professionals worldwide have participated in this online hackathon, building innovative AI solutions, chatbots, and natural language processing tools with Microsoft Fabric and Azure AI.  

Participants joined workshops, collaborated with experts, and competed for top prizes. The hackathon required completing a Microsoft Learn Challenge to enter, and winners will be announced on December 16, 2024—stay tuned to see which AI solution takes the prize! 

Take the challenge and get certified as a Fabric Analytics Engineer 

Missed the Hackathon but still want to prove your skills? Or are you just looking to prepare for the next generation of data analysis and accelerate your career as analytics professional? Then we have the perfect challenge for you.  

Get ready for your future as a Microsoft Certified Fabric Analytics Engineer by joining our Microsoft Fabric Skills Challenge. This immersive, gamified learning experience blends hands-on exercises, tutorials, and assessments to ensure a well-rounded learning experience. Benchwork your progress against your peers and develop marketable skills to advance your career.  

You’ll have 30 days to complete just 13 hours of content, which will prepare you to take the Fabric Analytics Engineer Certification Exam. Certified individuals are highly sought after by employers for their skills, and this exam validates your proficiency in utilizing the Fabric platform for data management and leveraging AI capabilities.  

The challenge ends on January 10, 2025, so don’t delay—join today! 

Coming soon: A new Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification 

We’re also thrilled to announce an all-new certification for data engineers. The new Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification will help you demonstrate your skills with data ingestion, transformation, administration, monitoring, and performance optimization in Fabric. To earn this Certification, you’ll have to pass Exam DP-700: Implementing Data Engineering Solutions Using Microsoft Fabric, which is currently in beta and generally available soon. 

Now is the time to start your Fabric journey 

As you can see, we have a treasure chest of Microsoft Fabric updates and events to explore, with interactive activities, exciting challenges, and expert-led deep dives to help you stretch your knowledge. The perfect place to start is our Plan on Microsoft Learn, “Make your data AI ready with Microsoft Fabric,” which provides a comprehensive guide to leveraging Fabric for data ingestion, transformation, storage, and visualization, empowering your team to build robust data pipelines and extract valuable insights from your data. 

Whether you’re an experienced data professional or just getting started, we look forward to you joining the Fabric community! 

The post Elevate your data insights with the latest Microsoft Fabric updates and exclusive events  appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

Consider this: over 97% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Microsoft Power BI and many of these organizations seek to enhance Power BI’s capabilities by extending it for planning and Hybrid Transactional/Analytical Processing (HTAP) workloads. However, traditional approaches to planning and reporting exacerbate silos: 

1. Historical insights feeding future plans: Organizations rely on historical performance data to inform future plans. This process requires transferring actual transactional data into separate planning systems, adding time and complexity. 

2. From planning back to reporting: Once budgets and forecasts are finalized, they must be reloaded into Power BI for variance analysis and performance reporting—a tedious and redundant process. 

Planning is rarely a one-time exercise. It evolves through multiple iterations, scenarios, and assumptions, requiring inputs from diverse teams, departments, and geographies. This fragmented approach necessitates back-and-forth data orchestration, creating inefficiencies and compounding the issue of data silos. 

Craig Schiff, Founder and CEO of BPM Partners, summarized it perfectly: “Planning solutions fully integrated with existing BI software is an underserved area that is growing in importance.” 

Microsoft’s vision for planning 

At Microsoft, our vision is clear: eliminate silos and empower organizations to plan and report seamlessly within a unified platform—Microsoft Fabric. 

With Fabric, enterprises no longer need to replicate data into separate software as a service (SaaS) or legacy planning systems. Instead, users can build plans and forecasts directly on top of the semantic models in Power BI, ensuring immediate availability for reporting and analysis across Fabric. 

Microsoft Fabric and Lumel: partnering for success 

We are excited to announce a deep collaboration with Lumel that brings Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) for planning applications to Power BI and Microsoft Fabric. 

Lumel’s no-code, self-service EPM solution enables business users to create sophisticated planning and reporting applications within Power BI, tightly integrated with Fabric. This approach delivers: 

• Seamless integration: Build and modify plans directly in Power BI, leveraging Fabric semantic models. 

• Collaborative capabilities: Commenting, notifications, scheduling, and approval workflows streamline team collaboration. 

• Broader use cases: Support for transactional and analytical scenarios expands Fabric’s utility for modern HTAP workloads and planning use cases. 

Lumel’s solution redefines the boundaries of what organizations can achieve with Power BI and Fabric. For example, with Lumel’s Inforiver Write-Back Matrix for Planning, businesses can effortlessly create their 2025 plans, save them to OneLake, and integrate them instantly into reporting and analysis workflows. 

Our strong collaboration with Lumel reinforces Microsoft’s commitment to providing a single, unified platform where planning and analytics coexist, helping organizations make better, faster decisions. 

Looking ahead with Microsoft Fabric 

Take the next step towards connected planning—streamlining  workflows, eliminating silos, and unlocking new possibilities with Microsoft Fabric and Lumel. 

Lumel and Microsoft Fabric

Enterprise planning and performance management in Power BI and Fabric

Watch here

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to empower organizations with cutting-edge tools for the future of planning and analytics. 

The post Planning in Microsoft Fabric: A shared vision through collaboration with Lumel  appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

After February 1^st, 2025, customers with expiring Enterprise Agreements (EA) or Microsoft Cloud Agreements will no longer be able to add or purchase Power BI Premium capacity through their agreement. Existing Power BI Premium capacity customers should work with their Microsoft account representative to transition to a suitable Fabric capacity and pricing plan ahead of their next renewal, which provides more flexibility in SKU size, pay-as-you-go billing options, access to Azure-only features, and is eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC). 

As you transition, you can select either pay-as-you-go pricing or reservation pricing. Reservation pricing for Fabric allows you to pre-commit Fabric Capacity Units in one-year increments, helping you save up to 40.5% over the Fabric pay-as-you-go prices. This reservation also provides more flexibility in SKU size, allowing the reservation discount to apply to other capacities within the same scope. Read our licensing documentation to learn more about how to purchase Fabric capacity reservations.

For more information on this announcement and the benefits of Fabric capacity (F-SKUs), please read the Important update coming to Power BI Premium licensing blog.

Microsoft Fabric

See how the role-specific workloads within Fabric can help everyone in your organization manage, interpret, and act on data and insights.

Try today

Migrating to Microsoft Fabric capacity 

As part of this retirement, you will need to migrate from your existing Power BI Premium capacity to a new Fabric capacity. After the end of your subscription, you will have 30 days of free Power BI Premium capacity; matching the amount of free capacity offered by your previously purchased P-SKU. This should reduce the need to pay for two capacities at the same time. In parallel, you also have 90 days to access your data in Power BI after the end of your subscription. Once you have migrated all of your data to your new Fabric capacities, you must delete your Power BI Premium capacities. The migration itself is simple—all you need to do is reassign your workspaces to the new Fabric capacity. However, many of you have tenants that span thousands or even hundreds of thousands of workspaces, making manual migration a challenge.

This blog will cover the different options you have when considering how you want to migrate your items between Power BI and Fabric capacities. First, we will cover how to migrate manually and then we’ll show how our new automated migration tool can help you accelerate the process. 

Manual migration 

You can reassign workspaces to the new Fabric capacity(s) individually from each workspace or by bulk assigning them in the admin portal.

Please note, that if your workspaces contain Fabric artifacts, they cannot be reassigned to capacities located in a different geography. If you have a small amount or no Fabric artifacts in your environment, you can disable Fabric features as you migrate your workspaces to accelerate the process. Learn how here.

Also note, that if you’ve created a large semantic model in a workspace, it must stay in that region. You cannot reassign a workspace with a large semantic model to a capacity in another region. 

If you want step-by-step instructions with screenshots on how to migrate, please download our migration guide.

Automated P-SKU to F-SKU migration tool 

Many customers have hundreds or thousands of workspaces in their Power BI Premium capacities. For these customers, we have created an automated migration tool that can help you programmatically migrate using Fabric REST APIs. This Fabric notebook will automatically create pay-as-you-go F SKUs for each capacity you select and make sure that F SKU is in the same region, has equivalent capacity, includes the same admins, and migrates all workspaces. You will have to manually transfer your capacity settings such as disaster recovery, notifications and any delegated tenant settings that have been overridden at the capacity level. These settings can be accessed via the Capacity Admin section of the Fabric Admin portal. And if you want a reserved instance, you will need to set that up yourself before using the tool. With that in mind, we recognize that you might be at different points of the journey and the notebook can help with several scenarios including:  

1. F-SKU creation: If your F-SKU has not yet been created, it will create the F SKU first and then complete the rest of the process. If you already have an F-SKU(s), it will skip the creation and complete the rest of the process. 

2. Migrating multiple capacities: You can migrate a single capacity, a list of capacities, or all of your capacities. 

3. Migrating trial capacities: You can migrate Fabric trial capacities to paid Fabric capacities. 

Check out the following demo to see how it works:

If you want to try out this tool for yourself, you can access the tool on the Semantic Link Labs GitHub here.

Semantic Link Labs also has other capabilities which can help you automate and simplify many technical processes in Fabric. These tools can help you with scenarios for migrating import and DirectQuery semantic models to Direct Lake, model best practice analyzer, Vertipaq Analyzer, and over 300 other functions. You can even create, update, suspend, or resume your Fabric capacities.  

Frequently asked questions 

Should I plan for downtime during the workspace migration process?

Yes, you should plan for migration to take place when users and jobs are not active to reduce potential failures. 

Will I have to migrate reports and data when I switch from P-SKUs to F-SKUs?

You will just have to reassign your workspaces to the new Fabric capacity. Read the step-by-step guidance above for more information.

What will happen to my Power BI and Fabric artifacts once I cancel my Power BI Premium capacity and purchase F-SKU capacity? 

You will be able to access your Fabric artifacts for 90 days after P-SKU capacity subscription has ended. During these 90 days, you can migrate your workspaces to your new F-SKU capacity without fear of losing access to your existing work. However, once the workspace is reassigned, all currently active jobs will be canceled. Rerun those jobs after migration. Migration doesn’t impact scheduled jobs.

Will I have to pay for both P-SKU and F-SKU as I transition? 

No. If a Premium subscription expires, you have 90 days to access your data. During this time, you will be able to migrate your workspaces to your new F-SKU capacity without losing access to your existing work. Once you’ve migrated your data, you should delete your Power BI Premium capacities that are no longer in use.

Does the Power BI Pro per user and Power BI Premium per user license requirement for Power BI Premium per capacity also extend to Fabric capacity? 

Power BI report authors and consumers of workspaces that are not in a Fabric capacity will still need a Power BI Pro Per User or their Power BI Premium Per User licenses. However, with an Fabric 64 SKU (F64)—a Premium P1 equivalent—or larger capacities, report viewers can view content with only a Microsoft Fabric free license if the content is hosted in the capacity. For non-Power BI activities, no Power BI Pro license is required. This means users can use pipelines, create data warehouses, use notebooks, and manage their capacities without a Power BI Pro license. 

Can I move a workspace from one capacity to a capacity in a different region? 

You won’t be able to move a Power BI workspace to a new region if it has Fabric items in it. E.g., Fabric Pipelines, Fabric Shortcuts, or Fabric ML, etc. If you move or delete these Fabric items first, you can then proceed with moving the workspace to another capacity in a different region. Additionally, if you have large data format enabled, you will need to convert those to small data format before transitioning to a new region. 

What are the benefits of Fabric capacity? 

Customers who migrate their Power BI Premium capacity subscription to Fabric capacity will enjoy a range of additional benefits. Fabric capacity is eligible for Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC) which means Fabric customers can apply their Fabric spend against their MACC commitment. There is also a pay-as-you-go option for Fabric which enables you to dynamically scale up or scale down and pause capacity as needed. Fabric capacity customers can also take advantage of smaller compute SKUs that start far below the entry-level Power BI Premium SKU.

Additionally, Fabric capacity customers will get access to Azure-only features like trusted workspace access and Managed Private Endpoints for Spark. These features are native to Azure and not available to Power BI Premium capacity customers. See all Microsoft Fabric SKUs available in your Azure region on the Microsoft Fabric pricing page.

Can I turn off all of Microsoft Fabric or some of the Fabric workloads?

To disable Microsoft Fabric, you can turn off the Microsoft Fabric admin switch. After disabling Microsoft Fabric, users will have view-only permissions for Microsoft Fabric items. If you disable Microsoft Fabric for a specific capacity while Microsoft Fabric is available in your organization, your selection will only affect that capacity. 

If I have both Power BI Premium and Fabric capacity, how does that impact my experience?

If you have Power BI Premium capacity on your agreement, multiple capacities may be provisioned by different users within the same tenant including both P-SKUs and F-SKUs. This allows capacities to be purchased and managed separately by different business units, each powering their own projects and creators, thus allowing easy cost management and control. It also means, your experience won’t be impacted if you’ve purchased both F-SKUs and P-SKUs. Note, all agreements that expire after February 1^st, 2025 will no longer be able to purchase Power BI Premium capacity.

Once the Fabric capacity is activated, will the existing Power BI reports and dashboards run the same way as they did in the Power Premium capacity? 

Once the dashboards are in a workspace assigned to a Fabric capacity with equivalent capability to the Power BI Premium capacity they were in (e.g., P1 equivalent to an F64), they should behave the same way. If you have any specific concerns, you should confirm through testing.

The post Automate your migration to Microsoft Fabric capacities appeared first on Microsoft Fabric Blog.

With Fabric, we focused on simplicity, openness, and autonomy. All Fabric workloads work together seamlessly out-of-the-box without the myriad of infrastructure and configuration settings you typically find in data platforms so you can focus on getting results. You can ingest structured and unstructured data in any format into OneLake’s open Delta Parquet format and even access third-party tools from industry leading software companies built directly into Fabric. Advanced security, governance, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities are woven into the platform with personalized experiences for admins and users alike. Microsoft Copilot and other AI capabilities are built into every layer of Fabric to help data professionals and business users automate routine tasks and get more done. In fact, we’ve found that users were 52% faster in completing standard data analysis tasks and uncovered insights 36% more accurately when using Copilot in Fabric, with 90% saying they were likely to adopt Copilot in Fabric.¹  

Fabric’s vision for a data platform has highly resonated with the industry, and more than 17,000 customers, including 70% of the Fortune 500, are already using Fabric to empower their data teams.

• Melbourne Airport, the second busiest in Australia, used Fabric to analyze their operational data in real-time and gained 30% increased performance efficiency across data-related operations. “It’s a radical and powerful new technology that can feel just like using Microsoft Excel or Power BI. But once in the hands of the user, it doesn’t feel like a new, complex technology at all,” Irfan Khan, Head of Data and Analytics.  
• Chanel, a world leader in luxury fashion, adopted Fabric not only to drive more value from its data and support their AI innovation, but also safeguard its data at rest and in-transit with Fabric’s end-to-end, built-in security, governance, and reliability. “We chose Microsoft Fabric as the foundation of this platform, driven by its ability to implement a data mesh approach,” Olivier Barbonnat, Chief Information Officer Europe.  
• Our own Microsoft IDEAS (insights, data, engineering, analytics, systems) team, one of the largest data teams in the world, transitioned to Fabric to support its AI ambitions. Its solution now encompasses 27,000 data sources, 420 petabytes of data, 35,000 data pipelines, 38,000 semantic models, and more than 600 teams relying on its models. The IDEAS team estimated it has received a 50% efficiency boost from consolidating assets in OneLake, using modern tools such as Spark and Python, Direct Lake mode in Microsoft Power BI, and AI-assisted coding through IDEAS Copilot.

Schaeffler, Hitachi Solutions, KPMG, Epic, and many other customers have seen a transformational impact to how they process data. You can explore all these Fabric stories on the Microsoft Customer Stories page. One of the reasons Fabric caught the imagination of so many is because, with Fabric, you can simplify and future-proof your data estate. Fabric’s capabilities and workloads will continue to expand and be seamlessly infused into our pre-integrated platform, helping you keep up with the technology trends without added work.  

And since launching Fabric, we’ve added new ways to bring data into Fabric with capabilities like mirroring and new shortcut sources. We’ve expanded Copilot in Fabric across almost every experience to help everyone automate routine tasks. We’ve added a multitude of security and governance features to help you make sure your data is secure at every step of its journey. We’ve added the ability to extend Fabric further with native, industry-specific workloads from Microsoft and other software developers. And most impactfully, we launched a new workload to help organizations make better decisions from Internet of Things (IoT), logs, and telemetry data—Real-Time Intelligence.  

With Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, we transformed Fabric into a platform equipped to support your operational scenarios and data in motion. And now, we’re helping you bring transactional scenarios to Fabric with the introduction of Fabric Databases. 

Introducing a unified data platform with Fabric Databases

Currently, the data and AI technology market is massively fragmented with hundreds of vendors and thousands of services. We believe the future of data and AI is the convergence of all your data services into a unified, open, and extensible platform, so you no longer have to manually stitch together disconnected services.  

Today, we’re thrilled to announce a major leap toward this goal with Fabric Databases, now in preview. Fabric Databases represent a new class of cloud databases that brings a world-class transactional database natively to Microsoft Fabric for app developers. With the addition of Fabric Databases, Fabric now brings together both transactional and analytical workloads, creating a truly unified data platform. Developers can streamline application development with simple, autonomous, and AI-optimized databases that provision in seconds and are secured by default with features like cloud authentication and database encryption. Built-in vector search, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) support, and Azure AI integration simplify AI app development, and your data is instantly available in OneLake for advanced analytics. Developers can even use Copilot in Fabric to translate natural language queries into SQL and get inline code completion alongside code fixes and explanations.

SQL database, the first available in Fabric, was built on our industry-leading SQL Server engine and the simple and intuitive SaaS platform of Fabric. In fact, data professionals who’ve tried SQL database in Fabric were able to complete common database tasks up to 71% faster and with 63% more effective task completion. They reported feeling 84% more confident in these tasks and finding the tasks up to 91% less difficult.²  These results were even more pronounced for people who were newer to cloud. Those with less than two years of cloud platform experience benefited the most in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, highlighting the simplicity and intuitiveness of Fabric Databases. 

SQL database is just the beginning for Fabric Databases, with more databases on the roadmap. Whether you’re an experienced data professional or just getting started, you can build AI apps faster and more confidently on Fabric Databases.

To learn more, read the Fabric Databases blog post, watch the Microsoft Mechanics deep dive video, and watch the following sizzle video:

General availability of Fabric Real-Time Intelligence

We’re also thrilled to announce Real-Time Intelligence is now generally available. With Real-Time Intelligence, you get both pro-dev and no-code tools to ingest high-volume streaming data with high granularity, dynamically transform streaming data, query data in real-time for instant insights, and trigger automated actions based on the data. The Real-time hub provides a central place to discover and manage all your streaming data. Dener Motorsport, a participant in the annual Porsche Carrera Cup Brasil event, used Real-Time Intelligence for in-race analytics, and their CEO, Dener Pires, said “Before we used Microsoft Fabric and Real-Time Intelligence, it was probably 30 minutes before the engineers knew that something was wrong with a car, could get the data, analyze it, and provide a solution. Today that process is done in minutes.” Check out this blog post and the following demo to see Real-Time Intelligence in action: 

OneLake catalog—a complete catalog for discovery, management, and governance

No matter what data project you’re trying to accomplish, it starts with the right foundation. OneLake, Fabric’s unified, multi-cloud data lake, is built for everyone in your entire organization as the single point to discover and explore your data. With OneLake shortcuts and mirroring, you can unify all of your multi-cloud and on-premise sources and enable your people to work from the same data—meaning fewer copies of data, better collaboration between your teams, and easier, more streamlined analysis. And since data is stored in an open format, you can use data in OneLake for all your data projects, no matter the vendor or service.  

Today, we’re excited to announce the OneLake catalog, a complete solution to explore, manage, and govern your entire Fabric data estate. The OneLake catalog comes with two tabs, Explore and Govern, that can help all Fabric users discover and manage trusted data, as well as provide governance for data owners with valuable insights, recommended actions, and tooling. Since the OneLake catalog is an evolution of the OneLake data hub, it already shows up in Microsoft 365, such as in Excel and Microsoft Teams and many other products in the Microsoft cloud for easy data consumption. OneLake catalog value can be extended to the Microsoft Purview data governance solution, Unified Catalog, which offers the data office, data stewards, and data owners advanced governance capabilities, including data quality and a global catalog for the heterogeneous data estate. The Explore tab is now generally available, and the Govern tab will be coming soon in preview.  

Learn more about the OneLake catalog by reading this blog post and by watching the following demo:

More Fabric innovation

The introduction of Fabric Databases and the growing opportunity with generative AI in accelerating data projects has encouraged us to reimagine the pillars of Fabric. We are now focused on making sure Fabric can provide you with: 

• An AI-powered data platform. Fabric can give your teams the AI-powered tools needed for any data project in a pre-integrated and optimized SaaS environment. You can even extend Fabric further by adding other native workloads from the Workload Hub, created by industry-leading partners.  
• An open and AI-ready data lake. Fabric can help you access your entire multi-cloud data estate from a single data lake, work from the same copy of data across analytics engines, and ensure your data is ready to power AI innovation.  
• AI-enabled business users. Fabric can empower everyone to better understand your data with AI-enhanced Q&A experiences and visuals embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps they use every day. 
• A mission-critical foundation. You can confidently deploy and manage Fabric with category-leading performance, instant scalability, shared resilience, and built-in security, governance, and compliance. 

Check out the new Fabric sizzle video to see these pillars in action: 

We’re excited to share a huge slate of announcements designed to help us better accomplish each goal above. These enhancements include: 

Fabric workload enhancements

• The general availability of sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric, a single place for all your environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data needs. Julie Nikulina, IT Solutions Engineer at Schaeffler AG, a global automotive and industrial supplier, mentioned that, “thanks to Microsoft Fabric, we’ll be able to answer lots of questions about climate neutrality and decarbonization company-wide via a single platform—and we can implement new use cases in short sprints within two to six weeks.”  
• Coming soon, the preview of AI functions in Fabric notebooks, which provide a simplified API for common AI text enrichments like summarization, translation, sentiment analysis, and more. 
• The general availability of API for GraphQL, which is an API to help you access data from multiple sources in Fabric with a single query API. 
• The preview of several enhancements to Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, which include new Fabric events, enhancements to Eventstreams and Eventhouses, and easier real-time dashboard sharing. 
• The preview of the Copilot in Fabric experience for data pipelines in Fabric Data Factory. 
• The preview of our integration with Esri ArcGIS for advanced spatial analytics. 

Microsoft OneLake enhancements

• The preview of open mirroring, a feature that allows any application or data provider to write change data directly into a mirrored database within Fabric. 
• The general availability of Azure SQL DB mirroring and the preview of SQL MI mirroring. 

New AI capabilities in Fabric

• Coming soon, the preview of AI skill enhancements, including a more conversational experience and support for semantic models and Eventhouse KQL databases. 
• Coming soon, the preview of AI skill integration with Agent Service in the newly announced Azure AI Foundry, allowing developers to use AI skills as a core knowledge source. 

Platform-wide enhancements

• The preview of workspace monitoring, which provides detailed diagnostic logs for workspaces to troubleshoot performance issues, capacity performance, and data downtime. 
• The general availability of the Workload Development Kit, created to help software developers design, build, and interoperate applications within Fabric. We’re excited to see many of our industry-leading partners announce preview of their workload hub offerings, including Quantexa, SAS, Teradata, Osmos, Esri, and Profisee. 
• The preview of further integration with Microsoft Purview including extending Protection policies to enforce access permissions to more sources and using Data Loss Prevention policies to restrict access to semantic models with sensitive data. 
• The general availability of external data sharing allows you to directly share OneLake tables and folders with other Fabric tenants in an easy, quick, and secure manner. 
• Fabric is FedRAMP High certified for the Azure Commercial cloud, the highest level of compliance and security standards required by the federal government for cloud service providers. Now government agencies can run Fabric on the Azure Commercial cloud while maintaining strict compliance. 

You can learn more about all of these announcements and so much more in the Fabric November 2024 Update blog post and the numerous blog posts that will go live throughout this week on the Fabric blog channel.  

Fabric billing and consumption updates

Finally, we’re making some important changes to Fabric’s billing model. First, coming soon, organizations with multiple capacities can now direct Copilot in Fabric consumption and billing to a specific capacity, no matter where the Copilot in Fabric usage actually takes place. Admins can assign specific members of their organization to the specified F64 or higher capacity for all of their Copilot requests. These requests will be consumed and billed on that assigned F64+ capacity, ensuring Copilot in Fabric usage doesn’t impact priority jobs while expanding Copilot access to any workspace regardless of its capacity.

Additionally, we’re providing capacity admins with more control over the Fabric jobs running in their capacities. Surge protection, now in preview, helps protect capacities from unexpected surges in background workload consumption. Admins can use surge protection to set a limit on background activity consumption, which will prevent background jobs from starting when reached. Admins can configure different limits for each capacity in your organization to give you the flexibility to meet your needs.

Watch Fabric in action at Microsoft Ignite

Join us at Microsoft Ignite 2024 from November 19 to November 21, 2024 to see all of these announcements in action across the following sessions:  

• “Microsoft Fabric: What’s new and what’s next” with Arun Ulagaratchagan and Amir Netz
• “Power AI apps with unified data and insights in Microsoft Fabric” with Panos Antonopoulos, Anna Hoffman, and Asad Khan 
• “Ingest, govern, and secure your data with OneLake” with Josh Caplan, Wilson Lee, and Adi Regev 
• “Unlock the power of Real-Time Intelligence in the era of AI” with Yitzhak Kesselman, Tessa Kloster, Niraj Revankar, Vijay Sankaran, and Ksenia Suresh. 

And six other Fabric breakout sessions. You can also join us at labs and theater sessions throughout the event. Find all the data-related sessions at Ignite. You can also learn about other announcements across our Azure portfolio by reading these blogs by Jessica Hawk and Omar Khan. 

• The next wave of Azure innovation: Azure AI Foundry, intelligent data, and more: We’re bringing a huge range of innovation to our AI platform including the new Azure AI Foundry, a unified platform designed to empower both developers and business decision-makers in the age of AI. 
• Scale your AI transformation with a powerful, secure, and adaptive cloud infrastructure: We’re also announcing cloud and AI infrastructure announcements, from advancements in chips and liquid cooling to new data integrations and more flexible cloud deployments.  

Finally, if you want more strategic guidance to help you along your data and analytics journey in the era of AI, you should watch the recent Data and Analytics Forum.

Getting started with Microsoft Fabric

New customers can try out everything Fabric has to offer by signing up for a free 60-day trial—no credit card information required. Learn how to start your free trial.  

If you’re considering purchasing Fabric and need help deciding on a SKU, we’re excited to share a new Fabric SKU estimator, now in private preview. You can sign up to try out this tool as part of the early adopter program—try the SKU estimator.

Start building your Fabric skills

Be one of the first to start using Fabric Databases

Ready to build reliable, highly scalable applications where cloud authentication and encryption are secured by default? Starting December 3, 2024, join live sessions with database experts and see just how easy it is to get started. View the schedule and register for the series.

Get certified in Microsoft Fabric—for free

Get ready to fast-track your career by earning your Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate certification. For a limited time, we’re offering 5,000 free DP-600 exam vouchers to eligible Fabric community members. Complete your exam by the end of the year and join the ranks of certified experts. Don’t miss this opportunity to get certified. 

A new Fabric certification for data engineers

We’re excited to announce a brand-new certification for data engineers. The new Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification will help you demonstrate your skills with data ingestion, transformation, administration, monitoring, and performance optimization in Fabric. To earn this certification, pass Exam DP-700: Implementing Data Engineering Solutions Using Microsoft Fabric, currently in beta.

Join us at the 2025 Microsoft Fabric Community Conference

Looking to gain hands-on experience with Fabric and learn directly from the people who created it? If so, join us from March 29 to April 3, 2025, at the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Register today. 

Explore additional resources for Microsoft Fabric

If you want to learn more about Fabric:  

• Sign up for the Fabric free trial. 
• Register for the Microsoft Data and Analytics Forum. 
• View the updated Fabric Roadmap. 
• Visit the Fabric website. 
• Join the Fabric community. 
• Read other in-depth, technical blogs on the Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog. 
• Explore the Fabric technical documentation.

Read additional blogs by industry-leading partners:

• “Data Governance in Microsoft Fabric with Microsoft Purview,” by CloudThat Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
•  “Key Fabric Announcements and Overview of Fabric Databases,” by Telefónica Tech.
• “Ignite 2024 – Microsoft Fabric announcements: the continued convergence of data platform and analytics to deliver intelligent insights,” by BJSS. 
• “Architecting tomorrow—A Microsoft Fabric Blueprint to intelligent enterprise covering Fabric Databases, AI Skills, Fabric and Microsoft Purview, Apache Iceberg support in OneLake,” by Avasoft Inc.
• “Microsoft Fabric Databases,” “Microsoft Fabric’s AI Skills,” and “Data Engineering: Liquid Clustering in Fabric,” by Verne Tech.
• “A First Look at Fabric Mirroring for SQL Managed Instance,” by Coeo Ltd.
• “Leveraging Microsoft Fabric for Dynamics 365 with Dataverse,” and “Automating Data Workflows in Microsoft Fabric: A Low-Code/No-Code Approach,” by PreludeSys.
• “Enabling self-service for supply chain analytics with Microsoft Fabric and Direct Lake,” “Transforming data operations with Microsoft Fabric and CI/CD for ISVs,” and “How Microsoft Fabric transformed data analytics for an ISV with Real-Time Intelligence,” by MAQ Software.
• “Real Time Intelligence for the Rest of Us with Microsoft Fabric,” by iLink Digital.       

¹Based upon n=209 user studies conducted by Microsoft Corporation in October 2024 that measured four common metrics associated with the consumption experience of Power BI in Microsoft Fabric. Qualitative sentiment gathered upon task completion. The actual results may vary. 

²Based upon n=210 user studies conducted with technical practitioners by Microsoft Corporation in October 2024 that measured time to complete four common tasks associated with AI application development on a SQL database in Microsoft Fabric and on Azure SQL Database. Actual results may vary based upon individual performance and sentiment.

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