Discover Microsoft Fabric for Power BI Users – A Must-Read for DynamicsCOE.AI Community!
Hello DynamicsCOE Community,
Are you a Power BI user eager to explore the future of data analytics? This Blog delves into how Microsoft Fabric enhances Power BI by integrating advanced features like centralized data storage with OneLake, seamless AI capabilities, and tools for real-time analytics—all without disrupting your current workflows.
Why Read the Blog?
This eBook answers the key questions on every Power BI user’s mind:
- Are Power BI and Microsoft Fabric two different tools?
- Do I need to migrate from Power BI to Fabric?
- Is Fabric complicated to use?
- What are the licensing requirements for Fabric?
Let’s explore some key highlights.
Power BI as a standalone service -
The Microsoft Power BI service started as a standalone Software as a service (SaaS) offering for combining, exploring, and visualizing your data. That same Power BI service is now a component of Microsoft Fabric. You can continue to use Power BI by itself, if that's what you need. And you can use the new capabilities of Fabric with Power BI to do even more with your data.
Overview of the Power BI service-
Power BI is a business intelligence platform for visualizing your data and using that data to discover insights and make business decisions. Power BI simplifies data analysis and decentralizes BI. Creators ingest, integrate, combine, and model data. When that data is shared with consumers, those consumers use the visualizations to make business decisions, track key metrics, and dig into the data to discover other business insights.
Overview of Fabric-
Fabric is an all-in-one data analytics solution that covers everything from data movement to data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence. Fabric consolidates several Azure data workloads with Power BI so that you and your colleagues can all work with different workloads, and in different roles, in the same environment. With Fabric, you can go from raw fragmented data to meaningful insights across your organization and in other clouds in seconds. The data for all of these workloads is consolidated in a multicloud data lake called OneLake. Each Fabric tenant has one OneLake, and all Fabric services work natively with data in OneLake. This one copy of the data can be used across all of Fabric. This centralized storage eliminates duplication, maintains a single data source, simplifies data discovery, and enforces security and data protection. The data is saved in a way that makes it accessible to the different workloads in the necessary format. AI capabilities are seamlessly embedded within Fabric, eliminating the need for manual integration. With Fabric, you can easily transition your raw data into actionable insights.
What about licenses?
If you have a Power BI or Microsoft 365 account, you can sign in to Fabric. For new users, create your first item in Fabric, and Fabric auto enrolls you in a free trial. The only license you need for all Fabric is a Fabric (Free) license. Fabric is yours to
explore at no cost. And, signing up takes only a few clicks. It's important to note that while a Fabric (Free) license provides access to many features, certain capabilities, especially those related to Power BI, may require additional licensing.
Let's understand how to migrate from Power BI to Fabric?
If you're already using the Power BI service
| You now have access to Microsoft Fabric and its additional workloads and capabilities. There’s no need to migrate; all your existing Power BI content is automatically available in Fabric. Workspaces and reports remain intact and accessible as before. The Power BI user interface and capabilities remain unchanged.
|
Start exploring Fabric
| Azure services users will find Fabric familiar, as it incorporates Azure Data Factory and Azure Data Explorer within the Fabric SaaS platform.
Existing Power BI users will also recognize the familiar foundation, user interface, and navigation of Power BI within Fabric.
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Shared concepts
and administration
| Fabric and Power BI share foundational elements like workspaces, reports, and capacities. Administration for both Power BI and Fabric is centralized in the Fabric admin center.
|
Now comes How Microsoft Fabric works with Power BI-
Microsoft Fabric provides a unified platform that seamlessly integrates data, roles, and workloads. Power BI is one of the key workloads within this ecosystem. Central to Microsoft Fabric is OneLake, a single data repository for each tenant. This centralized data store enables effortless use, analysis, and visualization of data across all workloads and roles, streamlining analytics across multiple datasets.
Large organizations benefit greatly from Fabric’s ability to manage vast data volumes and make them accessible across its suite of tools, including Power BI. While Microsoft Fabric now oversees Power BI administration, familiar tools like the Power BI service and Power BI Desktop remain unchanged. They continue to function as powerful solutions for transforming data from sources like OneLake or Excel into actionable business intelligence insights. Power BI solutions consist of numerous development stages and efforts, all performed within Power BI Desktop or the Power BI service. Of note, the data ingestion and transformation stages are all contained within Power BI. Various practicesand techniques to optimize and then scale a solution that processes these actions and runs entirely within the power BI service.
By introducing Fabric, some of the processing can occur outside of Power BI, earlier in the process – in a tightly integrated and managed environment. In this diagram, the data ingestion and transformations occur before the data gets to Power BI. Data shaping and transformation could occur in a Spark notebook or Gen2 dataflow where it is written to a lakehouse. A semantic model is built from the lakehouse structured data storage. The semantic model (that thing we used to call a Power BI “dataset”), in this case, exists both in Fabric and in Power BI. Every Fabric lakehouse has a corresponding semantic model that utilizes the Power BI in-memory analytic engine, so in a sense, the model is both a Fabric and a Power BI asset. The semantic model, report management and user access are managed in Fabric along with everything else using role based Entra security (aka “AAD or Windows security”)
Do you Need to Make Changes?
You DON'T NEED to make any changes. Power BI can work exactly as it has in the past. Import mode models continue to function, and DirectQuery mode continues to be supported as it has in the past. But, what CAN you do differently if you want to take advantage of the new and improved goodness offered by the Fabric platform? Let’s dig-in and see how this changes. Consider the solution components in the follow diagram encompassing portions of Power BI that we might consider transitioning to Fabric. The source connections enable connectivity from data sources to the Power Query queries that run within our Power BI model. After executing all the transformation steps in these queries, the resulting tables are loaded into an Import-mode data model. Measures in the model perform calculations for the visuals and reports pages on the reports.
In the Fabric solution, the Power Query queries are moved from Power BI to a Fabric Gen2 Dataflow. Since the new Dataflows in Fabric use the same query structures, language and visual designer as Power BI; little if anything might need to change. If the data sources are the same, queries could literally be copied and pasted from Power BI to the dataflow. 
A significant difference between Power Query in Power BI Desktop and Gen2 Dataflows in Fabric is that each query can have a destination. A query can be outputted to an Azure SQL database, a Fabric lakehouse, KQL database or to a Fabric warehouse. A dataflow is backed by the Spark engine through a lakehouse to perform optional staging for query results. This means that Power Query is now a first class ETL tool that can be used in enterprise solutions.
This eBook, written by Sowmya Tupakula (Power BI Consultant) and reviewed by Dr. Sandor Simon (Advisory Council Member, Microsoft Corporation) and Manish Singh (Microsoft Dynamics & Enterprise Architect), is your ultimate guide to understanding the seamless integration of Microsoft Fabric with Power BI.
Conclusion-
Microsoft Fabric represents a transformative step for Power BI users, offering an integrated environment that combines advanced data analytics capabilities with familiar tools. With the inclusion of features like OneLake for centralized data storage and seamless AI integration, Fabric empowers users to unlock deeper insights while maintaining the simplicity and efficiency of Power BI. Existing users benefit from a smooth transition, as there is no migration required—workspaces, reports, and tools remain consistent and accessible. Fabric expands the possibilities for data movement, real-time analytics, and business intelligence, making it a comprehensive solution for organizations of all sizes. By unifying diverse workloads in a single platform, Microsoft Fabric enhances collaboration, simplifies administration, and enables faster, more informed decision-making.
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