Back in May at its Build conference, Microsoft announced a new data analytics program called Microsoft Fabric and also made it available in a public preview. Today, as part of its Microsoft Ignite 2023 developers conference, the company announced that Fabric is now generally available.
In a press release, Microsoft stated:
Fabric combines the best of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory to create a single, unified software as a service (SaaS) platform with seven core workloads—each purpose-built for specific personas and specific tasks. By creating a single platform with tools for every data professional in a unified experience and architecture, it can reduce the typical cost and effort of integrating analytics services and help simplify your data estate.
Microsoft Fabric uses a unified, multi-cloud data lake called, naturally, OneLake, and it"s designed to virtualize a business"s data from many different clouds, accounts, and domains without any duplication of data.
Over 25,000 businesses and organizations have participated in the Microsoft Fabric public preview before today"s GA announcement. One of them is financial firm Ernst and Young, who claim that "Microsoft Fabric has been a game changer" for the firm, adding that it offers "cross-functional transparency and on-demand insights to make better and quicker decisions."
Microsoft also announced, naturally, that Fabric will get a Copilot generative AI feature in the near future. It will allow users to type in natural language text prompts for "to create dataflows and pipelines, write SQL statements, build reports, or even develop machine learning models."
The public preview of Copilot for Fabric will begin to roll out today for the Power BI, Data Factory, Data Engineering, and Data Science experiences, with all Fabric users able to use the Copilot preview by March 2024. Microsoft has yet to announce pricing for Copilot for Fabric.