Microsoft is working to make its cloud-based Fabric combined offering of data warehousing, data science, data engineering, and data analytics services more attractive, previewing a host of new features at its first annual European Microsoft Fabric Community Conference last week.
Fabric, released in May 2023, brings together six “workloads”: Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, Data Science, Real-Time Intelligence, and Power BI that Microsoft says will help enterprises reduce IT integration overhead, complexity, and cost.
Microsoft is hoping to grow its share of enterprises’ data analysis spend by encouraging them to replace disparate applications from multiple vendors with its single offering, but to do that, it needs to match those vendors feature for feature. This week’s preview announcements — and the release of earlier previews to general availability — take it a step closer to parity, and maybe close enough for some enterprises to make the jump.
