Microsoft’s cloud services are at the front and center of agile and scalable cloud solutions in the market. With data controlling and shaping the business decisions and product development based on customer interactions and metrics, the tech giant understands the complexities of handling high volumes of data. Hence, offers a world-class data analytics solution through Microsoft Fabric. At its core, it provides a unified platform that integrates data warehousing, data lakes, data governance, and machine learning into a seamless ecosystem.
In this article, we’ll discuss How to get started with Microsoft Fabric?
What is Microsoft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric is a revolutionary product of Microsoft’s cloud solutions, which allows you to create and manage data-centric applications. Unlike alternatives in the market, Microsoft provides you a unified platform comprising a plethora of data engineering products like data warehousing, data lakes, data governance, machine learning and more.
Say you are a pharmaceutical company, looking to bring life-changing medicine into the market. This could involve: collecting data from many sources like clinical trials, and patient records, analyzing the data to identify patterns, and collaborating with partners on the development process. With Microsoft Fabric, you can execute these processes and more from the comfort and security of a unified platform.
Different components of Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft Fabric is a powerful platform which combines the functions of many data analytics services. You have the freedom of using each service for specific use-cases and projects. To get the most out of them, let’s understand the various components of Microsoft Fabric.
Data Engineering
Consider Data Engineering as a concept of managing and transforming large sets of data effortlessly. With Microsoft Fabric, you can leverage its data engineering experience to transform data at scale via a Spark platform. Thanks to its integration with Data Factory, you seamlessly schedule and coordinate notebooks and spark jobs.
For instance, say you are an e-commerce company with large sets of customer data, accumulated over the years. You wish to analyze this data to understand customer behavior.
With the Spark platform, you can process all the data and perform complex transformations. This involves scheduling and controlling the transformation tasks at your pace. After the transformation, you’ll have clean data for analysis, providing valuable insights into customer trends and popular products.
Data Factory
Like the name, Data Factory is a factory of data from many sources. In simple words, a one-stop destination for all your data. You get a whooping 200 connecting sources to load data at scale on-premise and in the cloud.
Data Science
The Data Science experience of Microsoft Fabric lets build, and deploy, machine learning models with ease. Thanks to its integration with Azure ML, you can track experiments and the model registry, resulting in predicting patterns based on the organizational data and generating BI reports.
Say, you work in a manufacturing plant where many machines and equipment need regular maintenance. To prevent machine failure at business hours, you require a predictive maintenance system to forecast equipment failures.
This is where scientists in your organization can use the data science experience to test unique algorithms, track the experiments, to create a model to track your equipment in real-time and predict failures.
Data Warehouse
The Data Warehouse experience of Microsoft Fabric, gives you the power to store Data in open Delta Lake format and separates computing and storage functions for independent scaling. You get high-performance SQL data storage.
For instance, say you are a retail chain, with vast transactional data from your stores, including sales, inventory, customer information, etc. You can use the Data Warehousing feature, to run complex SQL queries. The independent storage and computing capabilities allows you to scale quickly and the Delta Format Lake, allows for versioning of data while maintaining its integrity.
Real-Time Analytics
Analyzing real-time data from sources like IoT devices, human interactions, application interfaces helps make quickly business decisions to drive success. Unfortunately, data from these sources is mostly semi-structured, with different schemas, making it tough for traditional data warehousing platforms to process and analyze.
But with Microsoft Fabric’ real-time analytics, you can:
- Ingest data from many sources, regardless of its format.
- Perform analytics on raw data, without creating complex data models.
- Partition and index your data to maintain its order.
- Automatically scale your operations to meet the workload.
Power BI
With the Power BI experience, Microsoft Fabric offers you an amazing Business Intelligence platform to quickly access all your data in Fabric. This helps you make calculated decisions based on data.
These are components of Microsoft Fabric, making it a powerful platform to manage, transform, and analyze large data sets efficiently.
Benefits of using Microsoft Fabric
With Microsoft Fabric, you can control your data lifecycle tailored to your goals. The plethora of powerful tools integrated into the platform, provide you all the functions you need to ingest, reshape, process and analyze data for your business.
One-platform for comprehensive data operations
Microsoft Fabric combines the powers of various data processing, transforming, storing and analyzing experiences into one platform. This allows you to load large and complex data sets from unique sources and transform them to your desired format. You can partition and index the data, apply versioning and analyze at scale with leaving the platform.
Not only does this reduce the complexity of handling data from many sources but also eliminates the need for using separate tools for each of the data journeys.
Increases development productivity
Data plays an integral role in the development of innovative products. To meet the demand and keep up with the market, it’s critical to focus on the development process, while handling and analyzing data at scale. Microsoft Fabric solves this complexity by allowing you to build a simple yet productive developers’ workflow.
You needn’t go through the learning curve of integrating many data platforms to obtain insights and store the results. With a unified platform, developers can focus on quickly implementing data driven parameters and focus on coding. Hence, increasing productivity and meeting market demand.
Flexible and adaptable data operations
One of the hurdles with working with data is its huge volume and format. Companies consistently obtain large volumes of data from many sources, like mobile applications. Websites, IoT devices, store operations and interactions and more. Unfortunately, data derived from these sources don’t share a single format. Hence, you must either perform separate analytical operations on each data set or cover them into a single format to run queries. Not only does this take an awful amount of time and effort but also puts you behind the market demand and competitors.
Microsoft Fabric simplifies this process by offering a flexible and adaptable platform. With its set of data experiences, you can query raw data, natively store large data sets in a single format, store and run analytics at scale. This helps you stay on top of the demands of the dynamic business environment.
How to get started with Microsoft Fabric?
We discussed the various components of Microsoft Fabric and their applications. There are many elements to consider and learn before building a productive workflow. While the platform and its features might seem overwhelming in the beginning, a step-by-step approach can help you get started.
Here’s how to get started with Microsoft Fabric:
Understand Microsoft Fabric at a high-level
Microsoft Fabric is a powerful all-in-one analytics platform which offers a suite of data integrating, storing, transforming, and analyzing tools to manage large and complex data sets at scale. Hence, the first step toward getting started with Microsoft Fabric is understanding its core features and terminology.
Learning the platform thoroughly in its entirety is a long-term goal which takes years of real-world practice. Hence, to get started, you must at least understand it at a higher-level and move forward at your pace. The Microsoft Fabric documentation is a great place to grasp important concepts through intuitive video explanations.
Sign up for Microsoft Fabric
You need Azure Active Directory credential to sign up for Microsoft Fabric. Hence, if you don’t have one, create one. Azure is at the core of Microsoft Fabric, offering access to suites of tools and resources on the Microsoft cloud.
Create a workspace
A workspace on Microsoft Fabric is like a container with all your data sets and pipelines on the platform. You can also set up data warehouses, configure data lakes and enable machine learning services. Setting up various experiences on the platforms depends largely on the type of data you wish to work with and your goals. Thankfully, in the documentation, you can find video tutorials to set up each experience by learning from real-world use cases.
Configure data access and security
Ingesting data from many sources and storing the transformed and analyzed results requires high-security to avoid leaks and data loss. Hence, you must explore the settings to establish secure connections to the data sources, ensuring the protection of sensitive information. This is where you can also create, edit, assign and manage user permissions to ensure an additional layer of security.
Ingest and transform data
Use the power of Azure Data Factory and Databricks to ingest data from sources and transform the data sets into simple and structured formats. You can cleanse, aggregate, or reshape data to prepare for analysis.
Build and deploy models
After you have transformed the data to your liking, you can create data models representing the structure of your data. Finally, deploy them on the platform.
Conclusion
Now, you know How to get started with Microsoft Fabric. With its prominent suite of data management experiences, it gives you the power to handle any kind and volume of data effortlessly. Its core components offer a tailored solution to help you reach your business goals. While the platform’s comprehensive functionalities might seem overwhelming at first, following the documentation and video tutorials paired with real-world projects, can help you understand and implement its features effectively.