News
Microsoft Announces Data and AI Enhancements to Fabric
Microsoft is bringing new AI-powered capabilities to Microsoft Fabric, its enterprise data analytics platform that combines business intelligence, data warehousing and data analysis in one product.
On Tuesday, during its Build 2024 conference in Redmond. Wash., the company announced that the platform, which has been available since last May, will be receiving many new updates, including the Real-Time Intelligence module.
This redesigned workload enhances Synapse Real-Time Analytics and Data Activator, allowing users to analyze high-volume event streaming data in real-time. The new Real-Time Hub helps manage event streaming data from various sources.
"From ingestion to transformation, querying, and taking immediate action, Real-Time Intelligence is an end-to-end experience that enables seamless handling of real-time data without the need to land it first," said Microsoft in an announcement. "With Real-Time Intelligence, you can ingest streaming data with high granularity, dynamically transform streaming data, query data in real-time for instant insights, and trigger actions like alerting a production manager when equipment is overheating or rerunning jobs when the data pipeline fails."
Microsoft also announced on Tuesday that Copilot for Fabric is now generally available. The AI assistant will help users create dataflows, generate code, build machine learning models and visualizing results using conversational language.
On the development front, Microsoft introduced the new Microsoft Fabric Workload Development Kit, currently in preview. This kit enables developers to create applications that integrate into Fabric. Additionally, the new API for GraphQL and user data functions simplify accessing and managing data across Fabric's services, enhancing the development of custom applications and workflows, according to Microsoft.
Microsoft is also updating the Data Factory module with a preview of data workflows in the module. Data workflows enable customers to define Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) files for complex data workflow orchestration within Microsoft Fabric. Powered by Apache Airflow, data workflows are designed to help users author, schedule and monitor workflows or data pipelines using Python.
Finally, Microsoft announced that Fabric has expanded interoperability with Snowflake and Azure Databricks, enhancing data access and analysis capabilities. The integration with Snowflake allows for bidirectional data access, while the Azure Databricks Unity Catalog integration simplifies the management and visibility.