The emerging role of Microsoft Fabric for data and BI professionals

Since its release in the first half of 2023, Microsoft Fabric has garnered plenty of attention from Microsoft customers and partners. Formerly known as Project Trident, Microsoft Fabric was announced in the first half of 2023 and entered general availability at Ignite 2023. The offering includes a wide range of features such as OneLake, positioned as the “OneDrive of data,” a Git integration for CI/CD, and shortcuts to other data resources.

Microsoft MVP Reid Havens, founder of Havens Consulting, spoke with MSDW about the emerging role of Microsoft Fabric among Microsoft customers and how the platform could reshape the focus of data, BI, analytics, and even Power Platform professionals in the ecosystem.

“There’s been a broadened sense of upstream options with Fabric,” Havens said, which he believes should make Fabric usable in more scenarios than traditional Power BI implementations.

Microsoft representatives have stated that the goal of Fabric is to support customers as far upstream and downstream as necessary in terms of data storage, processing, and analysis. Havens says he sees customers facing many of the challenges that Fabric aims to address.

If you have 100 different datasets, it’s creating different storage costs. That’s where a lot of clients are starting to move and looking at options to reduce costs, move business processes to lakehouses and warehouses [whenever they are available.

In addition to offering new ways of consuming ...