Unlock your data with Microsoft Fabric

Having the tools capable of making an immediate impact and delivering return on investment (ROI) is a huge challenge for businesses. 

In my capacity as Azure Solution Specialist at Grey Matter, I’m often approached by businesses looking to make the most out of their technology stack to deliver each of these results. 

How to unlock your data 

There are many things you could potentially do to make an immediate impact with your technology stack. From optimising an estate, all the way through to looking at new and innovative technologies to produce a better experience for your clients or users. 

Consider the amount of data you currently have as a business as you could be sitting on a goldmine. 

Whether you want to run complex calculations on your data sets using T-SQL, or you want to be able to run predictive analytics over your data to help with key business insights, the next step is learning how to visualise that data. This can be achieved with Microsoft Power BI, but the question remains, how can you manage all  your data? 

How Microsoft Fabric simplifies data 

While all the data at your disposal holds great potential, it can be difficult to manage. There are a lot of actions to be taken before your data shows its true value. From extracting your data, to transforming it and loading it many times over to be used by the various engines that can read and write to perform individual jobs.   

Microsoft Fabric eliminates the barriers standing in your way by removing the need to silo your data, and instead, enabling you to democratise your data so that it can be used to drive innovation. There are two main steps to be taken to help you to achieve this. 

First off, Microsoft Fabric creates a OneLake, which is essentially a Software as a Service (SaaS) version of a data lake. OneLake holds raw data at the tenant level so that it can be used. This cuts down on the number of data warehouses and data lakes required for your data and is also the first opportunity to implement tenant level settings for governance, which is paramount. 

Next, you’ll need to set up some capacity compute. There are various options to choose from, all of which include burst options. This enables you to access more capacity should you need it for a particular process. 

Setting up a Workspace and a Lakehouse 

After setting up capacity, you’ll need to set up a Workspace and a Lakehouse. The Workspace acts as the toolbox that provides you with various functionality and tools for data ingestion, transformation, analysis and more. You can assign permissions and policies to lock down each workspace as needed. 

The Lakehouse is functionally the workbench of the operation. It is the data architecture that combines all the various elements to provide the platform for storing, managing and analysing data. 

These are just some of the building blocks that go into Microsoft Fabric, but there’s more to consider depending on what you plan to do with your data. 

Microsoft Fabric engines and storage 

Your business may need to use a variety of engines depending on the familiarity or types of work you plan to carry out with your data. Each being required to extract, transform and load (store) the data to be able to work with it in the required format. 

Engines enable you to store your data in a Delta Parquet file, which offers better performance and a columnar file format, rather than a siloed approach. The benefit of this is that your data is organised into columns with row groups to enable you to organise it. Once it has been organised, row groups that don’t pertain to your query can be skipped, helping you to make better use of your data. 

Engines that work with Fabric include: 

• Apache 

• Spark 

• Azure Synapse 

• T-SQL 

Each of the above tools can read and write Delta Parquet, meaning you no longer need to have a siloed approach, or the management overhead required to manage numerous data estates. 

With Microsoft Fabric, you can put your data to use to unlock immediate ROI, gaining invaluable business insight. To discuss how you can unlock your data in more detail, or explore the options available to you, get in touch with us.