At its Build 2024 developer conference, Microsoft announced several upgrades to Fabric, the company's cloud- based data analytics tool suite .
New capabilities include a real-time Intelligence module, a toolkit for customizing workflows in Fabric, and the general availability of Copilot for Power BI.
Other Copilots for Fabric remain in preview
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Fabric, launched in May of last year, integrates the company's existing data warehousing, business intelligence, and analytics products into a single solution. This helps businesses combine workloads while reducing IT overhead, complexity, and consolidation costs.
The cloud-based offering, which provides a software-as-a-service (SaaS) experience to developers, helps extract insights from raw data and present them to business users. It consists of seven core modules and toolsets, including data connections, data engineering tools, data science workflows, and analytics tools.
Fabric modules include Data Factory, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Science, Synapse Data Warehouse, Synapse Real-Time Analytics, Power BI, and Data Activator—all built on the company's data lake offering, OneLake.
Synapse Real-Time Analytics combined with Data Activator
As part of the Fabric updates, Microsoft has combined two of its modules—Synapse Real-Time Analytics and Data Activator—to introduce a new module, called Real-Time Intelligence, which is available in preview.
Real-Time Intelligence combines the analytics and enabler workloads, offering additional capabilities such as a low-code interface. This solution helps businesses extract insights from data in real time, according to Microsoft.
According to the company, “With Real-Time Intelligence, business users can ingest streaming data with high accuracy, dynamically transform data, search for real-time insights, and trigger actions, such as alerting a production manager when equipment overheats or rerunning jobs when data pipelines fail.”.
The new module is supported by the Real-Time Hub—a window for discovering, managing, and leveraging event stream data from Fabric and other data sources.
“Through the Real-Time Hub, users have the ability to obtain insights from their data profile, configure the appropriate approval level, set alerts for changing conditions, and more—all without leaving the hub,” the company said.
Fabric Workload Development Kit makes its debut
Microsoft also introduced the Fabric Workload Development Kit, a set of tools designed to help developers build interoperable applications on Fabric.
“Applications built with this kit will appear as native workloads in Fabric, delivering a consistent experience to users directly in their Fabric environment without any intervention,” Microsoft said, adding that developers can publish and monetize these workloads through the Azure Marketplace.
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Additionally, Microsoft announced that it is developing a workload hub experience in Fabric. This will allow enterprise users to discover, add, and manage their workloads without having to leave Fabric.
Neo4j has already used the Fabric Workload Development Kit to make its offering available on Fabric.
Microsoft is adding two new features for developers in preview: the API for GraphQL and user data functions.
“The API for GraphQL is a flexible and powerful RESTful API that allows data professionals to access data from multiple sources in Fabric with a single API query,” the company said, adding that the API can help businesses reduce network overhead and speed up response times.
User data functions, as Microsoft describes them, are user-defined functions designed for Microsoft Fabric experiences across data services, such as notebooks, pipelines, and event streams. These functions allow developers to easily build applications using a variety of data sources, such as lakehouses, data warehouses, and mirrored databases, leveraging the power of native code and custom logic.
Additionally, Microsoft has updated the Data Factory module in Fabric with a new feature called data workflows. This new feature, now in preview, allows enterprises to define directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) for complex data workflow orchestration within Fabric.
“Data Workflows is powered by Apache Airflow and is designed to help businesses author, schedule, and monitor workflows or data pipelines using Python,” Microsoft said.
Copilot for Power BI goes GA
Microsoft announced Tuesday that the first Copilot for Fabric is now generally available. Although Fabric was released last year, the company said it will integrate the AI-powered Copilot into its unified analytics platform.
Copilot is now accessible through the Power BI module in Fabric, while versions of Copilot in the Data Factory, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Science, and Synapse Data Warehouse modules remain in preview.
Copilot in the Power BI experience can be used to create and summarize reports. Additionally, Copilot in other Fabric experiences can be used to create data flows, code, and machine learning using natural language.
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Additionally, Microsoft announced a new Copilot for Real-Time Intelligence module in preview, which allows enterprise users to search data in real time.
New data sources and integrations Snowflake, Databricks
Some of the latest updates to Fabric include the addition of OneLake shortcuts for connecting to data sources beyond Azure Data Lake Service Gen2. These shortcuts are in preview.
"With an internal data gateway, you can now create shortcuts to Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3, and S3-compatible storage systems, whether they are on-premises or have other network constraints," Microsoft said.
Additionally, Microsoft is working with Snowflake to achieve full interoperability between Snowflake and OneLake. “We are excited to announce future support for Apache Iceberg on Fabric OneLake and bidirectional data access between Snowflake and Fabric,” Microsoft said. This integration will allow users to analyze Fabric and Snowflake data on any machine on any platform and access data through applications such as Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and Azure AI Studio.
Shortcuts for Iceberg in OneLake will be available soon, said Arun Ulagaratchagan, vice president of Azure Data. Additionally, enterprise users will be able to access Azure Databricks Unity Catalog tables directly through Microsoft Fabric in the coming months.
“Through the Fabric portal, users can create and configure a new Azure Databricks Unity Catalog item in Fabric with just a few clicks. They can add a full catalog, a schema, or even individual tables,” the company. When data is modified or tables are added, removed, or renamed in Azure Databricks, the data in Fabric will stay in sync, Ulagaratchagan added.
Additionally, enterprise users will soon be able to access Fabric data assets, such as lakehouses, as a catalog in Azure Databricks. “While the data remains in OneLake, you can access and view the data series and other metadata in Azure Databricks and leverage the full power of Unity Catalog,” said Ulagaratchagan. This capability will include extending Unity Catalog’s unified governance to data and AI in Azure Databricks Mosaic AI.
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This means that business users will be able to combine this data with other native and federated data in Azure Databricks, perform analytics, and publish the aggregated data to a Power BI workspace.
Source: infoworld
