Why chose Microsoft Fabric as an analytics platform

This post was first published on Lead Consultant at Evidi, Anders Krohn's, blog on LinkedIn on July 31, 2024.

Let's first consider what you need to gain insights from your data. You need a way to gather the data, a place to store it, tools to transform and/or aggregate it, and finally, a way to visualize it.

While there are many tools that can do this, none are as successful as Power BI.

However, connecting directly to a source system can lead to performance issues or even locks in the source systems. Large datasets and complex semantic models can be slow to update in Power BI because it queries the source each time you update the semantic model.

If for example your source systems are ERP and CRM, they are likely highly normalized with a lot of tables and columns. Additionally, you may need to combine data from various sources, such as APIs, on-premises sources, and maybe even sprinkle it with some Excel.

Sewing all of this together in Power BI is possible on a small scale, but it quickly becomes complex and difficult to manage and maintain, especially as you build new reports on top of existing semantic models.

Have you ever taken over semantic models that took hours to update, where even minor changes in Power Query took minutes to process and felt like forever to load? Now, imagine having to add and remove elements from those semantic models as reporting needs grow.

To make your reporting solution more robust, scalable, and secure, you need the right tools for the job. There are many options available, even within the Microsoft ecosystem, so choosing between them and making the best decision is often hard and complicated. You can find an overview here.

• Microsoft Fabric is a collection of all of Microsoft's best data tools and services, including Power BI. It provides excellent tools for data collection, storage, transformation, and visualization, all within a single SaaS platform. It also has the tools you need for data science, machine learning and real-time data analytics.

• Microsoft continuously release updates Fabric, so it gets better every month. You can check the roadmap here.
• It has a good and still growing community of users that helps and supports each other when they need it. Read a good example from Reddit here.

By implementing Microsoft Fabric as an analytics platform and a layer between Power BI and the source systems, you get a highly scalable and secure solution your business can grow with as the data and analytics demands and requirements change.