Microsoft Fabric – A Unified View of the Modern Data Landscape

Written By Siddharth Mohanty, Sr. Manager, Data Management

Stepping into The Future With AI 

The future is AI.  

From easy-to-use copilot experiences to custom generative AI solutions, every organization today is exploring how they can best utilize AI.

However, as businesses get ready for an AI-powered future, they will also require clean data to power AI. It takes a well-orchestrated data estate that can support everything from specialized AI initiatives to scalable AI solutions that span the whole organization to foster game-changing AI innovation. This is a challenging prospect for most organizations whose data environments have grown organically over time with specialized and fragmented solutions. A complex data estate leads to data sprawl and duplication, infrastructure inefficiencies, limited interoperability, and data exposure risks.  

Data leaders who wish to help businesses streamline and advance their data estate must evaluate thousands of data and AI offerings, select the best services, figure out how to integrate them, and do all of this in a way that is flexible and scalable enough to change as the business grows.  

Microsoft Fabric has eliminated the need for spending time integrating specialist solutions and managing complex data estate by introducing a unified stack of end-to-end analytics and data platforms.  

Below is what we, at Fresh Gravity, envision the transition from a fragmented technology stack to a unified platform would look like with Microsoft Fabric. 

 Microsoft Fabric – Key Features 

The Microsoft Fabric platform is the unified foundation of Fabric—an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need. Secure and governed by default, Fabric provides a unified Software as a Service (SaaS) experience, a unified billing model, and a lake-centric, open, and AI-powered framework for your data analytics. Listed below are all capabilities that get implemented by MS Fabric.

Microsoft Fabric Capabilities

Microsoft Fabric Implementation Use Cases 

With its unified architecture, Microsoft Fabric can implement all Data Management and Data Science use cases. Listed below are some key implementation use cases – 

Select Use Cases 

Fresh Gravity POV for a Data Platform Implementation 

As part of expanding on the MS Fabric capabilities, at Fresh Gravity, we have recently designed and built an in-house mini-data platform for ingesting data files from various sources, landing the data to a landing zone on Fabric, processing and transforming the data using the Medallion Data Lakehouse architecture and finally serving the data for consumption via Power BI. 

Key Features of our mini-data platform: 

• Sets up workspaces in Power BI Fabric license 
• Sets up OneLake Lakehouse 
• Builds Data Factory copy pipelines to read data from Azure BLOB, Snowflake, and SQL Server and land the data to a transient landing zone on OneLake 
• Uses Pyspark notebooks to read data from the landing zone to the bronze table on the OneLake Lakehouse 
• Uses Pyspark to perform transformations, cleansing, and standardizations as needed to load the silver table. At Silver, the notebooks apply canonical data models, normalizations, SCD Type 1, SCD Type 2, etc 
• Uses the Gold table as data mart tables with domain aggregates for reporting purposes 
• Added flexibility allows a separate data flow built-in for ad hoc analysis of the raw files landing on OneLake lakehouse which can be further used via visual query for reporting in PowerBI 

Below is the architecture diagram of the mini-data platform built on MS Fabric –  

Architecture diagram of the mini-data platform built on MS Fabric

With newer Microsoft Fabric services becoming GA releases, Fresh Gravity is working proactively to stay ahead by building and deploying real-life data projects on MS Fabric. Stay tuned as we continue to share similar blogs and thought leadership content on various other aspects of Microsoft Fabric.  

To learn more about our data project implementations, best practices, and regulatory-compliant solution designs using industry-standard tools and services, please write to us at info@freshgravity.com.