Good data is the lifeblood of every company working to grow in this Industrial 4.0 age, and data analytics is the mission-critical nervous system for good, strategic decision making. Now, Microsoft has released Fabric, a new tool that integrates technologies like Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Power BI into a single solution designed to unlock the potential of raw through artificial intelligence (AI).
According to the release, Fabric comes with seven core workloads that, when used together, allow companies of any size to compete, iterate and deliver well above their weight classes in their industries. Data Factory provides more than 150 connectors to cloud and on-premises data sources, drag-and-drop experiences for data transformation, and the ability to orchestrate data pipelines. Synapse Data Engineering is designed to enable great authoring experiences, instant start with live pools, and the ability to collaborate. Synapse Data Science is the built-in end-to-end workflow where data scientists build sophisticated AI models, collaborate, and train, deploy, and manage machine learning models. Synapse Data Warehousing is the converged lake house and data warehouse experience, loaded with SQL performance on open data formats. Synapse Real-Time Analytics ties in IoT data streaming from smart devices, telemetry, and logs, and then analyzes massive volumes of semi-structured data with high performance and low latency. Power BI in Fabric is all about reporting and visualization from AI-driven analytics for easy-to-understand and use insights from data. Finally, Data Activator, which will be available for users soon, the company said, will provide no-code, real-time detection and monitoring of data and trigger notifications and actions when it finds specific, defined patterns in data.
Microsoft said that Fabric is an end-to-end analytics product that will handle all aspects of an organization’s AI data needs, but it outlines several specific differentiators:
- Complete analytics platform that provides all the capabilities required for a developer to extract insights from data and present it to the business user,
- Lake-centric and open through its SaaS, multi-cloud data lake called OneLake where it is organized into a data hub, and automatically indexed for discovery, sharing, governance, and compliance.
- Powered by AI from the Azure OpenAI Service at every layer to enable developers to leverage the power of generative AI against their data and find insights in their data, using conversational language to create dataflows and data pipelines, generate code and entire functions, build machine learning models, or visualize results.
- Empowering every business user through full integration with Microsoft 365 applications and the Power BI reporting feature.
- Reduces costs by existing under one, integrated Microsoft software ecosystem where enterprises can purchase a single pool of computing that powers all Fabric workloads
Microsoft has made the features available as part of a Fabric free trial right now.
“We think that Fabric’s upcoming abilities will help us eliminate data silos, making it easier for us to unlock new insights into how we show our customers even more love,” said Geoffrey Freeman, MTS, Data Solutions and Analytics, T-Mobile, in the release. “Querying across the lakehouse and warehouse from a single engine—that’s a game changer. Spark compute on-demand, rather than waiting for clusters to spin up, is a huge improvement for both standard data engineering and advanced analytics. It saves three minutes on every job, and when you’re running thousands of jobs an hour, that really adds up. And being able to easily share datasets across the company is going to eliminate so much data duplication. We’re really looking forward to these new features.”
For now, Microsoft said it plans to continue offering its existing suite of data products like Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Data Explorer, but that Fabric represents an evolution of those services and customers will be able to upgrade over time. Right now, Fabric is in preview and those who click the link above will be able to try the free trial.
Read the full article here
