Fabric Community Conference 2024: Product plans will fulfill 4 Fabric promises

Microsoft announced Fabric, its SaaS-based unified data platform, with early previews in mid-2023. It reached GA in November 2023, and as of this week Microsoft has over 11,000 paying customers for the service that aims to centralize an organization’s full range of data sources and analytics-related activities, according to CVP Uran Ulag at this week's Fabric Community Conference 2024.

Speaking at the inaugural Fabric event, Ulag urged attendees to think about unification of their information and to look to Fabric to eliminate integration challenges with Fabric’s newer and faster tools for connecting disparate data sources, extracting and replicating data, and accelerating development. 

“All data lives in OneLake, it’s like OneDrive for your data,” he told the Fabric Community Conference audience, adding that this vision “has resonated with customers.”

Ulag, Microsoft Technical Fellow and CTO for Azure data Amir Netz, and a range of product managers kicked off the event with nearly two dozen demos of new features that are already GA or nearing release. The team focused on four themes: delivering a complete analytics platform, a lake-centric and open approach, business user empowerment, and AI capabilities from Copilot.

“OneLake is the beating heart” of Fabric, Netz said. “It changes the whole data landscape.” 

Microsoft representatives compared OneLake’s approach to data with OneDrive’s approach to storing an organization’s files. Microsoft wants customers to treat OneLake as the SaaS lake for the entire organization, no matter how the data is connected. it is designed to have oversight of every source, from official metrics and semantic models to data warehouses, data lakes, relational databases, and even un-official sources in various corners of an organization. All tabular data in OneLake is stored in a common format, Delta Parquet, an open standard for storage that then makes that data accessible by all engines without the need for import or export. 

All of Microsoft’s serverless compute engines, including Data Factory, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Warehouse, Synapse Real Time Analytics, and Power BI, have been optimized to work with Delta Parquet natively, Microsoft says.