Microsoft Fabric: A New Era in the Data Lakehouse World
What is Microsoft Fabric?
The latest revolutionary product that has deeply shaken the lives of data professionals and engineers, and radically changed modern data architectures, is Microsoft Fabric.
While storing data for years, we debated, "Should we build a Data Lake? Or a classic Data Warehouse (DWH)? Where will Power BI stand? Where will we train machine learning models?" To meet these needs, organizations had to purchase separate services such as Azure Data Factory, Azure Synapse Analytics, Power BI, and Azure Machine Learning, and set up complex networking and integration infrastructures to connect them.
Fabric takes these ecosystem components from being isolated tools (PaaS) and offers them under a single roof with a single licensing model (SaaS) as a massive Data Analytics service. Think about how Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are unified under the 'Office 365' umbrella; Fabric is the Office 365 of data.
No More Data Copying with OneLake (Zero-Copy)
The real secret and revolution of Fabric is the OneLake architecture. Just as OneDrive is a standard for document management in corporate life, OneLake is positioned as the 'OneDrive' for all of the organization's data.
In legacy architectures, you would pull data with Data Factory, put it into a SQL server, process it there, then create a View to read it and pull it into Power BI's memory (Import Mode). The same data was constantly copied and moved within the network, increasing storage costs by 3-4 times.
Now, all data resides as a single copy in the open-source Parquet / Delta Lake format within OneLake in the Azure environment. Thanks to the brand new DirectLake feature in Fabric, Power BI can read this data instantly and at extraordinary speed, just as if it were inside its own engine, without copying it or taking it into memory at all.
Unified Governance
Who could see a piece of data and which departments had access to which tables used to be configured separately in each system. Thanks to Microsoft Fabric, security rules are defined once at the OneLake level. This rule applies equally to the user connecting to the data with Power BI, the data scientist connecting with Python, and the analyst connecting with a SQL endpoint.
As DVision Technology, we are one of the pioneering Microsoft partners that migrate the traditional On-Premise warehouses or complex PaaS cloud architectures of our corporate partners in Türkiye to the modern Microsoft Fabric SaaS structure in just months.
