I’m seeing a lot of excitement from customers over Microsoft Fabric, now that it GA’d a few weeks ago. One thing that is generating a lot of that excitement is using Fabric in a way that I call “the great unifier”. That is, using Fabric shortcuts and mirroring so that anyone can very easily use Power BI to easily create reports and dashboards using data from multiple sources without copying the data into OneLake. Shortcuts and mirroring make it appear to the report user that all the data they need is local due to the ease of use of object Explorer:
These tables all seem to be local, but in fact only the first four are local, and the other three, designated by the paperclip-looking icon, could be shortcuts to data located all over the world. For mirrored sources, data is replicated in real-time and copied to OneLake and appears as a mirrored database that can be joined in a query (example below shows Cosmos DB and SQL DB being mirrored as warehouses). This is a huge benefit because you don’t need to write ETL and the data is never outdated:
Click here for a YouTube video demonstrating mirrorring.
Here is what Fabric looks like as the great unifier:
Some points about the benefits of such an architecture:
- If end-users do not like the reporting features in other products like Databricks or Snowflake, or they are just used to Power BI, Fabric gives them a great way to use the Power BI reporting tool instead of being forced to use the reporting tools from other products. Plus, the end-user can easily supplement the data from those other products by uploading their own data into Fabric and joining the data together, instead of having to ask IT to ingest the data into those other products
- Some customers will use a competing cloud platform for various data analytics workloads, but may still want to use Fabric’s business intelligence, data science, data engineering, and other capabilities on that data
- It is an easy button, helping end-users who are not technical to unify data from all different sources
- Microsoft is not trying to compete or replace other products/clouds
- Helps with being multi-cloud: If you have data in Azure, Amazon, and Google (supported soon), you can use Fabric to bring all that data together to query and generate reports
- Great way to bring data together to train ML models
- Think of shortcuts as a light virtualization layer
- Shortcuts cache data and only pull over data that is needed, saving egress costs and removing the need to build ETL to keep data in sync
- A great way to support data sovereignty as you can keep data in data lakes within countries and create shortcuts to unify all the data
- Microsoft Purview can be used for data governance
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