Last month, the PreludeSys team enjoyed attending the inaugural Microsoft Fabric Conference (#fabcon) in vibrant Las Vegas. The event was a whirlwind of excitement as we delved into the latest updates and future roadmap for Microsoft Fabric. In addition to networking with the Microsoft brains behind the Fabric platform, we also interacted with Fabric enthusiasts from all over the globe. After three days of power-packed keynotes and participating in the interactive sessions, we are thrilled to share the ground-breaking advancements announced at FabCon to revolutionize Microsoft Fabric integration, governance, and AI capabilities.
What’s New in Fabric?
Here are the four new and improved features previously under beta or preview.
1. Security Enhancements: Safeguarding Your Data
Fabric is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that provides a comprehensive security package for the entire platform. It eliminates the need to maintain your security setup and shifts this responsibility to the cloud. With Fabric, you can leverage Microsoft’s expertise and resources to safeguard your data, address vulnerabilities, monitor threats, and meet regulatory requirements. Additionally, Fabric offers tools to manage, control, and audit your security settings, adapting to your evolving needs.
Microsoft Purview with Fabric
Microsoft Purview seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Fabric, enabling users to discover and manage Fabric items within Purview applications. This integration offers various benefits:
- Microsoft Purview Data Catalog: Automatically view metadata of Fabric items within Purview Data Catalog, with live updates.
- Microsoft Purview Information Protection: Discover, classify, and protect Fabric data using sensitivity labels from Purview Information Protection. Apply sensitivity labels to all Fabric items to ensure protection during export via supported paths. Compliance admins can monitor sensitivity label activities in Purview Audit.
- Microsoft Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP): DLP policies are supported for Power BI semantic models in Fabric, detecting upload of sensitive data like credit card or social security numbers.
- Microsoft Purview Audit: All Fabric user activities are logged and accessible in the Purview audit log, providing comprehensive tracking capabilities.
Additionally, Fabric is equipped with a suite of security enhancements designed to fortify your data protection strategies.
Microsoft Entra ID and its secured access protocols
Fabric provides an organized data framework where every domain, sub-domain, workspace, folder, and subfolder offers a structured approach to data organization. Such settings enable users with fine-grained access control that ensures domain security at every level. In addition, every interaction with Fabric is now encrypted by default and authenticated using Microsoft Entra ID, ensuring the highest standards of data security.
(c) – Microsoft
From the architecture diagram, you can see that the Microsoft Entra ID manages the access that permits users to authenticate within Fabric. All services on the back and front end are protected by network security rules that block public internet access. The Entra ID also restricts communication within virtual networks based on the privilege of each internal service.
Additionally, Fabric offers new governance tools such as data lineage, information protection labels, data loss prevention, and Purview integration, which empower you with comprehensive control over your data ecosystem. With these add-ons, you can Seamlessly connect to on-premises data and data within virtual networks (VNet) using trusted workspaces and private links. The Entra ID and governance solutions will ensure your data is confidential and secured.
2. Integration Capabilities: Streamlining Data Flows
One of the significant integration takeaways announced at the conference was the public preview of the Mirroring capability, which was previously available only for private preview.
Mirroring and its Benefits
Mirroring in Fabric is a new, easy, and smooth way to make copies of data from Azure SQL Database, Azure Cosmos Database, and Snowflake data sources. It creates a snapshot of this data in Fabric OneLake, which is stored in Delta tables. The copying happens in real-time, almost as soon as changes occur in the original databases.
(c) – Microsoft
Mirroring in Fabric enables secure access to transactional databases and data warehouses such as Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL DB, and Snowflake. This facilitates near real-time data ingestion into Fabric’s OneLake without incurring additional storage.
Here are some key reasons why Mirroring databases in Fabric is helpful:
- Saves Money: You don’t need extra computing power to make these copies, so it costs you less. Plus, you get lots of storage space (we’re talking terabytes) based on how much you need.
- No Coding Needed: You do not have to write fancy code or set up complex Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) processes. It is all done for you!
- Get Data Faster: Since the copied data is updated almost instantly, you can quickly access the most recent information. This means you can analyze it and gain insights faster than before.
Data Handling and Unification
Fabric has a new enhancement in the Dataflow Gen2, which enables lightning-fast data copying capabilities with the latest fast copy features. Some shortcuts allow data unification across domains, clouds, and accounts by creating a single virtual data lake. This eliminates the need for data duplication and reduces process latency.
The ability to copy and access data across domains will bolster the full integration with Azure DevOps for Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Also, the Git integration, which is still in preview, is expected to be available for GA in the near future. This will be a game changer for Fabric, along with the additional integration benefits it offers.
Real-Time Analytics with Fabric
Real-time analytics simplifies data integration, offering instant access to insights with automatic streaming, indexing, and partitioning. Key features include capturing, transforming, and routing real-time events, ingesting data from any source, and running analytical queries directly on raw data. Its seamless integration with other Fabric products ensures interoperability and extends functionalities across the ecosystem. Real-Time analytics empowers informed decision-making by unlocking actionable insights efficiently, driving business growth.
3. Power BI Features: Empowering Data Visualization
Enhancements in the existing Power BI bring many new features within Microsoft Fabric. The Power BI Home is now available by default on the Desktop, making it easy to access. Also, it has brought in support from new data sources that can easily create paginated reports, expanding your data visualization capabilities. However, one of the significant Power BI upgrades is the DAX enhancement using Copilot.
DAX (Data Analysis Expressions) is a formula language used to create and manipulate data models in Microsoft Power BI. With the help of Copilot, you can now quickly generate DAX queries, edit them, or even explain their purpose. By specifying the desired data output, Copilot can quickly provide a DAX query that fits your needs. Additionally, Copilot can assist with tasks such as adding columns and formatting to existing queries or explaining specific DAX functions. This feature dramatically increases productivity and efficiency for those working with DAX queries.
If you want to know more about Power BI enhancements, watch the video.
4. AI Capabilities: Unleashing Intelligent Insights
Microsoft Fabric now boasts cutting-edge AI capabilities to drive intelligent insights from your data. Fabric offers Seamless Data Exploration and AI Empowerment with new and improved capabilities.
Fabric introduces the AI-powered Copilot feature, enabling users to explore warehouse data effortlessly using natural language queries. This simplifies data exploration, making insights more accessible and personal, in addition to the NLQ capabilities of Power BI, which are now enhanced with Copilot and Fabric’s momentum.
Additionally, Fabric offers Azure OpenAI Service integration to support RESTful API and SynapseML.
This integration will provide the added benefit of text analytics and text translation. With Text Analytics, it’s now easier to understand written content. Azure AI Text Analytics streamlines text comprehension, detects the language, analyzes sentiments, extracts key phrases, and recognizes sensitive information. The Azure AI Translator also enhances multilingual interactions by translating and transliterating text, making communication across languages a breeze.
Connect with Our Experts
Microsoft Fabric empowers organizations to transform their data into actionable insights. With its recent update, Fabric offers a comprehensive suite of features that cater to diverse industries and applications. Explore its potential and unlock the true power of your data today.
Are you excited to learn more about these game-changing updates in Microsoft Fabric? Schedule a call with us, and we’ll walk you through them.
