Getting started with Microsoft Fabric

1. Getting started with Microsoft Fabric

Welcome to this introductory course on Microsoft Fabric!

2. Meet the instructor

Our instructor is Fiodar, a senior software engineer, ex-Microsoft engineer, and a Microsoft MVP.

3. Course goals

No prior Fabric experience is needed. In this course, you'll build a high-level understanding of Microsoft Fabric: what it is, what it's used for, and who uses it. You'll see how Fabric is organized into workspaces, items, and workloads, and how teams manage and govern their data. Later, you’ll analyze big data and real-time data, all while practicing directly in a Fabric environment.

4. What is Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric is a unified SaaS analytics platform. SaaS means software as a service. In practical terms, Fabric is a cloud-based environment where teams can work with data using connected tools. Instead of thinking of data engineering, data warehousing, data science, real-time analytics, and reporting as completely separate products, Fabric brings them together in one platform.

5. What problems Fabric solves

Let’s look at the problem Fabric is designed to solve. Imagine a retail company asking a simple question: why did online sales drop last month? The answer is spread across many systems. Website events show what customers viewed. Store systems record transactions. Marketing tools track campaigns. Inventory systems track stock levels. Traditionally, answering it means stitching separate tools together: one to collect the data, another to store it, and another to report on it, each with its own copy. The copies drift apart, and teams argue over whose numbers are right. Fabric brings these tools into one platform, built on a single copy of the data in OneLake.

6. Building blocks of Fabric

Let's break down a few core Fabric building blocks. A team collaborates in a shared area known as a workspace. A workspace contains a variety of data analytics tools known as Fabric items. Examples include lakehouses and warehouses to store data, notebooks to explore and transform data, and pipelines to move data and automate workflows. We will look at these items in more detail throughout the course.

7. How Fabric components relate to each other

OneLake is the storage foundation that helps these pieces work together. Think of OneLake as a building. Within this building, a workspace represents an individual room. A Fabric item would be something you'd find inside that room, such as a piece of furniture.

8. Getting started with a Fabric workspace

You'll use a workspace shortly. It shows the Fabric items we already have. We can also add new items from the create button after clicking the three dots on the left hand menu.

9. Selecting an item to create

Once we open the dialog, we see a variety of items we can create. Note that these Fabric items are categorized into different workloads. Each workload loosely corresponds to a job function. For example, the Data Engineering workload contains items that data engineers would typically use.

10. Let's practice!

Let's practice!

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