One year ago, we launched an end-to-end data platform into general availability designed to help organizations power their AI transformation and reimagine how to connect, manage, and analyze their data. Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one, software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform with AI-powered services to accomplish any data project\u2014all in a pre-integrated and optimized environment so all your data teams could work faster, together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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<\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Fabric\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a>. 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\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And since launching Fabric, we\u2019ve added new ways to bring data into Fabric with capabilities like mirroring and new shortcut sources. We\u2019ve expanded Copilot in Fabric across almost every experience to help everyone automate routine tasks. We\u2019ve added a multitude of security and governance features to help you make sure your data is secure at every step of its journey. We\u2019ve 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\u2014Real-Time Intelligence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019ve 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 <\/sup> 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n SQL database is just the beginning for Fabric Databases, with more databases on the roadmap. Whether you\u2019re an experienced data professional or just getting started, you can build AI apps faster and more confidently on Fabric Databases.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To learn more, read the Fabric Databases blog post<\/a>, watch the Microsoft Mechanics deep dive video<\/a>, and watch the following sizzle video:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
Introducing a unified data platform with Fabric Databases<\/h2>\n\n\n\n