Enterprises have been collecting and storing vast amounts of data from applications, services, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, and other sources for decades. Every year, the amount of data collected grows at an alarming rate.
But deriving value from this data has proven challenging for most. Orphaned data is out of sync. Inconsistent data can lead to high integration costs. Poor data quality can destroy new AI models. Outdated reporting can lead to misinterpretation of insights. All of this stifles the ability to unlock the full value of data, hindering innovation and AI experiences.
Today, we are pleased to unveil theMicrosoft Fabricand Copilot in Microsoft Power BI. Fabric, now in preview, is an end-to-end, people-centric analytics product that brings together all of an organization's data and analytics in one place. It brings together the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Azure Data Factory into a unified Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform. Data engineers, data warehouse professionals, data scientists, data analysts, and business users can seamlessly collaborate within Fabric to foster a well-functioning data culture across the organization.
Copilot in Power BI, now in private preview, combines advanced generative AI with your data to help everyone discover and share insights faster. Simply describe the insight you need or ask a question about your data, and Copilot will analyze and extract the right data into a stunning report - instantly turning data into actionable insights.
What's included in Microsoft Fabric?
See Arun Ulagaratchagan's blog post to read the full storyMicrosoft Fabric Preview Announcement.
Fabric offers six experiences: Data Integration Experience Powered by Data Factory, Data Engineering Powered by Synapse, Data Warehousing, Data Science and Real-Time Analytics Experience, and Business Intelligence (BI) Using Power BI—all hosted on a lake-centric solutions on SaaS. We're also developing an experience called Data Activator to help customers respond immediately to data changes by building a detection system that automatically alerts teams to take action in the right context.
Learn more about these new experiences by reading the following announcement blogs:
- Data Factory Announcement Blog— With Data Factory in Fabric, organizations can unify their hybrid and multicloud data assets and unlock value through a data integration experience that combines the ease of use of Microsoft Power Query with the scale and capabilities of Data Factory. Currently in preview.
- Synapse Data Engineering Announcement Blog— Next-generation Synapse data engineering in Fabric provides data engineers with a world-class Spark platform and a great authoring experience to help transform data at scale and democratize it with Lakehouse, while collaborating effectively. Currently in preview.
- Synapse Data Warehouse Announcements Blog—Synapse Data Warehouse delivers industry-leading SQL performance and scale. For the first time, data engineering, data warehouse professionals, and BI analysts can operate on a unified open format, providing a single copy of the truth for all roles. Currently in preview.
- Synapse Data Science Announcement Blog— Data scientists can work side by side with their data engineering and BI counterparts to build rich AI models at speed and scale. Currently in preview.
- Synapse Real-Time Analytics Announcement Blog— Organizations can use Synapse Real-Time Analytics to explore data and perform high-performance and low-latency real-time analytics on massive data streams from applications, websites, IoT devices, and more. Currently in preview.
- Data Activator Announcement Blog—Data Activator in Fabric enables users to create a detection system to monitor analytics to drive human and automated actions across the organization in a timely manner. Currently in private preview.
- OneLake Announcements Blog—OneLake is "OneDrive for data." It is a complete, rich, enterprise-grade data lake delivered as a SaaS service. OneLake is at the heart of Fabric's lake-centric approach. Currently in preview.
What does Microsoft Fabric mean for Power BI users?
Power BI customers will continue to enjoy all the functionality available to them today. With the launch of Fabric, Power BI Premium customers can simply turn on the Fabric tenant settings in the admin portal. With Fabric's unified capacity model, any new workload can use Power BI Premium capacity. read thisdocumentMore information on Fabric's single capacity model. Power BI Pro customers can access this functionality through a capacity trial.
In addition to providing access to six other powerful experiences in Fabric, we are announcing somePower BI PremiumOnly features designed to change the way you analyze and visualize data.
Next-Gen AI with Copilot in Power BI
Introducing Copilot in Power BI! With Copilot in Power BI, we're infusing the power of large-scale language models into every layer of Power BI to help users do more and create more value from their data. With Copilot, you simply describe the visuals and insights you're looking for, and Copilot does the rest. Users can create and customize reports in seconds, generate and edit DAX calculations, create narrative summaries, and ask questions about their data, all in conversational language. With the ability to easily customize the tone, scope, and style of narratives and seamlessly add them to reports, Power BI can also deliver more impactful data insights through easy-to-understand text summaries.
we have publishedQuick Measurement Recommendations for DAXAbility to help analysts quickly create the required code. The rest of the Copilot experience in Power BI is now available in private preview. Stay tuned to the Power BI blog for the latest updates and public release dates for Copilot in Power BI.
Unified data foundation using OneLake and Direct Lake modes
Power BI standardizes on open data formats by adopting Delta Lake and Parquet as its native storage formats to help you avoid vendor lock-in and reduce data duplication and management. Direct Lake mode unlocks incredible performance directly to OneLake with no data movement required. Combined with the ability of other analytics engines to read and write data directly in the lake, Fabric will reshape the way business users consume big data. Power BI datasets in Direct Lake mode enjoy query performance comparable to import mode, with the real-time performance of DirectQuery. And the data never leaves the lake, so there's no need to manage refreshes.
We're excited to announce the Direct Lake mode preview for Power BI datasets on Lakehouses. We plan to launch a preview of the Direct Lake mode dataset on Data Warehouse soon. Warehouse's Direct Lake mode dataset is currently in private preview, but it will work if you use Lakehouse's SQL endpoint.
To try Direct Lake from Lakehouse or Warehouse in Fabric, clickNew Power BI datasets, select the tables to include, and clickconfirm.Open the data model to create measures and relationships as you would for any other Power BI dataset. Finally, clicknew reportAnd create beautiful Power BI reports. Notice the integrated experience from data in the lake to report creation without leaving the browser or performing a refresh.
Enterprise-grade collaboration with Git integration for Power BI datasets and reports
We also enable more seamless collaboration with your development team on Power BI contentGit integration.You can now easily connect your workspace to an Azure DevOps repository to track changes, revert to previous versions, and merge updates from multiple team members into a single source of truth with just one click will be synced to the workspace.
As a developer, you can use this integration to:
- usePower BI DesktopWrite reports and dataset metadata files in a source control-friendly format.
- Save to a folder as a Power BI project (.PBIP) instead of a .PBIX file.
- Enables multiple developer collaboration, source control integration to track version history, compare different revisions (diff) and revert to previous versions.
- Use continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) to enforce a quality gate before reaching production.
- Enable code reviews, automated testing, and automated builds to verify the integrity of deployments.
With Git integration to develop and deploy Power BI content across development, test, and production workspaces, users can leverage Git integration and deployment pipelines for end-to-end application lifecycle management of their work. Developers can automate this process using the user interface (UI) experience or through other tools such as Azure Pipelines.
End-to-end governance across the fabric
Building analytics solutions is complex. Data teams must manage everything from user roles to data ingestion, security, compliance, collaboration, workspaces, and more. With Fabric, Power BI, Synapse, and Data Factory are unified on a unified SaaS platform. This allows data teams to collaborate on the same copy of data in a single workspace and use centralized management, governance and compliance tools. These capabilities include data lineage and impact analysis, data protection with sensitive labels, data endorsement, administrator monitoring, and more. These unified experiences let you easily switch between tools and collaborate with others on your team. Additionally, as large numbers of data and analytics projects are built within organizations, efficient discovery and management becomes key. OneLake Data Center enables everyone in an organization to centrally discover and explore the data available to them and relevant to their business areas, take further action, or build on what others have already begun.
accessthis blog postLearn more about Fabric management and governance.
General-purpose computing power simplifies procurement and management of analytical projects
Fabric greatly simplifies the procurement and management of resources. Customers can purchase a single compute pool that powers all Fabric experiences. With this all-encompassing approach, customers can create solutions that can freely leverage all workloads without compromising their experience or business. General-purpose computing power significantly reduces costs because any unused computing power in one workload can be utilized by any workload. For Power BI Premium customers, existing Power BI Premium A SKUs will automatically support all new Fabric experiences. Starting June 1st, new Fabric SKUs will be available for purchase in the Azure portal, giving you access to all of these experiences.
How to get started with Microsoft Fabric?
Enable Fabric in your Power BI tenant
Power BI customers can now access Fabric by opening the Fabric tenant settings in the Power BI admin portal. To give Power BI admins time to prepare, we've turned the switch off by default. You can opt in or out of Fabric through the admin portal. You can also choose to enable Fabric for specific users or security groups within your tenant.Fabric will be enabled by default for all Power BI tenants starting July 1st if admins take no action.
Additionally, if you want to try out Fabric in one or more capacities before enabling it for your entire tenant, you can enable it for a specific capacity in the Capacity Settings tab of the Admin Portal. Like tenant settings, this capacity setting can also be restricted to specific users or security groups.
Upgrade existing Power BI Premium capacity
If your administrator has enabled Fabric at the tenant level, all Premium capacity will be automatically upgraded to support Fabric. Additionally, capacity administrators can enable Fabric at the capacity level (as described in the previous section), allowing anyone with access to this capacity to use the new Fabric experience. To help you prepare and understand how this will impact your use of Power BI Premium, the new Fabric experience will not reduce your capacity usage until August 1, 2023. However, you can monitor how Fabric affects your capacity usage through the Capacity Metrics app.
Universal Fabric capacity free trial for 60 days
If you don't already have Power BI Premium, you can get a free trial of Fabric (learn more aboutFabric try-on).If your tenant administrator has enabled trials, when you (1) create a project that requires capacity or (2) clickstart trialFrom your account manager in the upper right corner of the portal.
This capacity can be used for one or more workspaces, allowing you to create data warehouses, lake houses, notebooks and more. After 60 days, you canAzure Portal(Available after June 1).
As a tenant administrator, you will see all active trial capacity configured for users within your tenant in the Power BI admin portal.
Fabric Learning Resources
To help you get started with Fabric, we recommend several resources:
- Microsoft Fabric Learning Path: Take a high-level tour of Fabric and how to get started.
- Microsoft Fabric Tutorial: Get a detailed tutorial with step-by-step guidance on how to create an end-to-end solution in Fabric. These tutorials focus on several different common patterns, including Lakehouse architecture, data warehouse architecture, real-time analytics, and data science projects.
- Microsoft Architecture Documentation: Read the Fabric documentation to view detailed documentation on various aspects of Fabric.
join the conversation
Want to learn more about Fabric from the people who created it? Join us on May 24 at 9AM PT for two days of live events to see Fabric in action. These sessions will be available on demand after May 25. Join a live event or view the full conference listblog post.
join usMicrosoft Fabric CommunityPost your questions, share your feedback, and learn from others.
Learn more about otherMicrosoft Power Platform Announcements at Microsoft Build 2023.