FabCon 25: Fabric offers more Dynamics 365 BI architecture options for analytics, real-time scenarios

As a SaaS data platform, Microsoft Fabric ought to be one of the strong options for delivering on the BI needs of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations applications. At Microsoft Fabric Community Conference 2025, company representatives and partners presented the emerging integration model known informally as “Fabric Link” as a BI integration option between Dataverse and Fabric data warehouses as an alternative to the older but better-known Azure Synapse Link option for F&O.

The Fabric Link (aka “Link to Fabric”) story starts with emerging capabilities delivered by the Dataverse team to store F&O table data in Delta Parquet format. This transformation step, done with no compute costs or architectural management on the part of the customer, is one of the key enablers of this method compared to Synapse Link, which requires each customer to manage their own Azure PaaS architecture to ingest F&O data, run Spark routines to do the Delta Parquet transformation, and take other steps before the data can land in Azure Synapse for use in BI initiatives.

For the Business Applications team at Microsoft, encouraging customers to embrace Fabric Link also keeps more revenue in their realm rather than Azure’s, while also shifting some spending into Fabric capacity. This approach stores all data in Dataverse, with shortcuts and mirroring from Fabric OneLake.

Selecting Fabric Link over Azure Synapse Link requires a few key decision points that presenters at FabCon explained to attendees.

Decision point: Dataverse storage capacity and cost

Azure Synapse Link can be both a complex PaaS-based architecture and a potentially costly set of services to run. But costs grow in Azure resources rather than in Dataverse, where Fabric Link stores the delta parquet format data that OneLake would use. ...