Wrangling Data was never easy
As a Data Scientist “aficionado”, I have always enjoyed creating analytics and views on both R and Shiny applications, and Microsoft PowerBI, hence I could not resist making this week’s article about how the new Microsoft Fabirc is trying to revolutionise the analytics landscape. This new Microsoft vision was announced during the “Microsoft Build 2023” event this week.
During my career, I have had many occasions to guide businesses into their data-driven journeys, where more often than not, the beginning of the journey, was about the middle of the way, the questions were more abundant than the data, and the reporting was done on the back of a quite complex and labour intensive… yes, you guessed it, Excel spreadsheet. In many cases, we had to play “snake and ladders” and return the business expectations to square zero.
This is now changing thanks to Microsft’s new vision. By integrating data movement, data science, real-time analytics and business intelligence in a single unified platform, Fabric greatly reduces the effort of transforming data into insights.
What is Micorosft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric is a comprehensive analytics solution designed to meet the different needs of businesses. Where before we businesses needed careful consideration to assemble services from several providers, Fabric provides a highly integrated, end-to-end solution that simplifies analytics requirements. It is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, combining components from Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Azure Data Explorer into auser-friendly interface. The platform provides a variety of deeply integrated analytics experiences shared across familiar interfaces, allowing data engineers, data scientists, and business analysts to collaborate seamlessly.
It is finally that time when data science might become part of the business and “citizen analysts” might be able to stop using Excel (I know, I know, but I can keep dreaming about it) to use a more suitable tool to create analytics and data story-telling.
Key Components
Without adding too much technical jargon, I’ll try to provide a quick overview of the different components of the solution and what are they used for on a data pipeline to produce those nice “End of the Month” reports or “real-time” analytics that Directors and C-level love to see so often.
Data Factory
Because data sources always come in different sizes and shapes, data engineers usually need space to “massage” the data into a usable format. Fabric provides world-class Spark platform to support data engineers prepare the data, enabling large-scale transformation. The integration of Data Factory allows for efficient scheduling of the transformation jobs.
Data Engineering
Of course, to be able to transform the data, run automated jobs and share the results it’s important to have the right factory. For anyone who has ever used Power Query (present in Excel since the early 2000s and also in Power BI), Data Factory offers a familiar environment directly integrated into Azure Data Factory, with over 200 connectors to seamlessly bring data and connect to on-premises or cloud.
Data Science
Enriching data and “feeding” your Machine Learning or complex simulation algorithms is what data scientists enjoy doing. With direct integration to Azure Machine Learning, it’s easier than ever to create predictive models and shift from descriptive analytics to predictive. Stop asking what happened, start thinking about what will happen.
Data Warehouse
Data always takes a lot of volume, but we always may need to access it for research or further discovery. That’s why it is important to have organised warehousing to keep our transformed and analysed sources. With industry-leading class SQL performance and scalability, Fabric is well-equipped to allow organisations efficiently and securely store and analyse their data.
Real-Time Analytics
Certain applications require quick data ingestion and analytics over a “stream”. Fabric’s Real-Time Analytics engine excels at handling observational data, and semi-structure formats. Ideal for IoT data streams, and other fast-growing data categories powering enterprises.
Power BI
Having all that data at our fingertips and only showing a simple table would lead to a massive disappointment (we all like our pie charts and staked bars with colours, after all). There is no better way to present data than by creating effective and powerful visuals and stories.
Power BI is fully integrated into Fabric, providing quick and intuitive access to all the data stored in the ecosystem. Making data-driven decisions has never been this easy for business owners.
Business Benefits
Ok, that’s a lot of information, but, what is it that makes this platform different and where does the value reside?
- Streamlined Analytics: a more simple journey from the raw data to the endpoint data dashboard
- Efficiency and Collaboration: No more siloed approach where different teams prepared the data in different ways.
- Scalability and Performance: All the components are delivered as a service and are capable of scaling up to cater for business needs. No longer a business needs to overpay for a completely overpowered solution to produce their required business intelligence
- Cost savings: Because it provides an all-in-one solution, it removes the need to pay for several different vendors, subscriptions and systems.
- Centralised administration and governance: all the components can be managed by administrators from a single portal. Data governance is managed at global level, ensuring regulatory compliance.
Conclusion
And did I forget to mention it? Yes, you have integrated AI into this! Asking plain questions about your data was never this easy.
If you need data analytics (what business is not at this point) to make better decisions, but the current solutions are too expensive or too complex to understand. If your business is currently doing “Excel reports” based on multiple manual extractions…
Now is the time, Fabric is here to change all the data processes, and best of all, you can trial it for free!
