Intro to Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is a unified data & analytics platform that brings together, and improves upon, Microsoft's existing suite of data products. It can be thought of as the third generation of Microsoft data platforms, where first generation (e.g. HDInsight, SQL Data Warehouse) were somewhat isolated takes on traditional data products; second generation was Azure Synapse Analytics, which integrated platforms at a UX level but still felt a little disjointed at the data level; and now we have Microsoft Fabric which builds upon the Synapse "unification" vision, with a particular focus on enabling deep data-level interoperability. In this post we introduce its core offerings, as well as weigh up the pros and cons of this new product.