Preface

Building end-to-end analytics systems has been a real challenge for organizations across the globe. While there are many services/products to cater to a specific need for the analytics system, there is no single service/product that provides complete analytics cohesively and coherently. This means customers spend a fair amount of time stitching together these services as well as managing multiple copies of their data across different data stores, rather than focusing on creating business value for their organization.

Microsoft Fabric is the first and only service/product on the market that provides a unified and complete analytics platform, built from the ground up for the era of AI. It offers an integrated experience, all the way from data integration to OneLake, data transformation, visualization, and a unified business model.

This book starts with an overview and the concepts of Microsoft Fabric and then, step by step, demonstrates building analytics systems for different types of real use cases that organizations often work with, such as lakehouses, data warehouses, real-time analytics, and data science. Finally, it talks about different manageability aspects, such as monitoring, security, DevOps, and using Copilot to supercharge developers’ productivity.

Who this book is for

This book is intended for data professionals, such as data analysts, data engineers, data scientists, data warehouse developers, ETL developers, business analysts, AI/ML professionals, software developers, and chief data officers, who want to build a future-ready data analytics solution for the era of AI to drive their organization toward long-term success. For PySpark and SQL students entering the data analytics domain, the book offers a broad foundation, developing their skills to build end-to-end analytics systems for different use cases. Basic knowledge of SQL and Spark is presumed.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Overview of Microsoft Fabric and Understanding Its Different Concepts, introduces the overall analytics landscape of Microsoft Fabric and other Microsoft offerings, and it discusses how Fabric has leaped ahead of other products/platforms available on the market with its unique differentiators.

Chapter 2, Understanding Different Workloads and Getting Started with Microsoft Fabric, sets the stage for the various workloads that are built into Microsoft Fabric, including Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Science, Data Warehouse, Real-Time Analytics, as well as Power BI. This chapter helps you to understand each workload and correlate them to your skillsets and environment, ensuring that you understand the full environment when each workload is discussed in later chapters.

Chapter 3, Building an End-to-End Analytics System – Lakehouse, walks you through building an end-to-end lakehouse solution. This chapter works in parallel to the following data warehouse chapter, by showing you how a data engineer professional can be successful in Microsoft Fabric by leveraging Spark skillsets.

Chapter 4, Building an End-to-End Analytics System – Data Warehouse, takes you through building an end-to-end data warehouse solution. This chapter works in parallel to the previous lakehouse chapter by showing how a data warehouse professional can be successful in Microsoft Fabric.

Chapter 5, Building an End-to-End Analytics System – Real-Time Analytics, explores Fabric’s real-time analytics by creating a KQL database, connecting to an eventstream that simulates data, and analyzing it using KQL. You will understand the types of sources that can be consumed, see how data is sent to OneLake for consumption by other compute engines, and be introduced to KQL.

Chapter 6, Building an End-to-End Analytics System – Data Science, shows you how to implement and operationalize machine learning and artificial intelligent models end to end, all the way from data ingesting to cleansing, preparing, visualizing for exploratory analysis, tracking, and training the model. Further, it will cover the process to operationalize the model for scoring (batch and interactive).

Chapter 7, Monitoring Overview and Monitoring Different Workloads, covers monitoring different aspects of Fabric using Monitoring hub, including Data Factory pipelines, Spark jobs for both the data science and data engineering workloads, using DMVs and query insights to monitor the data warehouse, and the KQL database activity for real-time analytics. Additionally, it covers the capacity metrics app that can be used to gain insights into the capacity unit usage.

Chapter 8, Administering Fabric, examines how to enable Fabric for a tenant, the options to overwrite the tenant-level settings at a capacity level, and how to associate a capacity with a workspace. We will also cover the different types of capacities and how tenants, capacities, and workspaces are all tied together. This information is vital to being able to administer Fabric effectively across teams and capacities.

Chapter 9, Security and Governance Overview, explores tenant-level Fabric security settings, how Entra ID is used to allow external users access to Fabric, and how to secure workspaces and items. It also demonstrates how to use Purview for data cataloging and governance, and domains for data organization.

Chapter 10, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), covers DevOps process and teaches how to implement CI/CD to move your code items from one environment (development) to another (test or production).

Chapter 11, Overview of AI Assistance and Copilot Integration, explores how AI is used to extend the developer experience and provide deeper insights into your data with the Copilot experiences built into each workload. This includes an overview of the Copilots for data science, data engineering, Data Factory, and Power BI, as well as the tenant-level settings required to enable the capabilities in the Fabric tenant.

To get the most out of this book

Microsoft Fabric is delivered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. As a result, all software updates and patching are handled by the service. While there are additional tools such as Visual Studio Code or Azure Data Studio that can be used to extend the developer experience, this book has been written in a way that only requires a modern web browser to complete all the tutorials.

Software/hardware covered in the book	Operating system requirements
A modern web browser (Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome)	Windows, macOS, or Linux

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

For the most up-to-date version of the Microsoft Fabric documentation, including Spark versions and functionality not covered in this book, visit https://aka.ms/FabricDocs. To see the most current roadmap for new Fabric features, visit https://aka.ms/FabricRoadmap.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Learn-Microsoft-Fabric. If there’s an update to the code, it will be updated in the GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: “With Fabric Spark, you can install popular Python and R libraries in-line while leveraging commands such as pip or conda install, while also installing libraries at the workspace level.”

A block of code is set as follows:

COPY INTO [dbo].[MyTable]
FROM 'https://mystorageaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/curated/weather/florida_weather.parquet'
WITH (
     CREDENTIAL =
            (
            IDENTITY = 'SHARED ACCESS SIGNATURE',            SECRET = ''
            ),
     FILE_TYPE = 'PARQUET'
);

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see on screen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: “For that, navigate to the Tenant settings page in the Admin portal page of the tenant, expand the Users can create Fabric items field, toggle the switch to enable or disable it, and then hit Apply.”

Tips or important notes

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Get in touch

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