During the Build 2024 developer conference, Microsoft revealed significant updates to its Fabric platform, a cloud-based suite of data analytics tools. These enhancements include the introduction of a Real-Time Intelligence module, a new toolkit for customizing Fabric workflows, and the full release of Copilot for Power BI.

Several of these Copilot tools for Fabric are still in the preview stage.

Launched in May of the previous year, Fabric integrates Microsoft’s various data warehousing, business intelligence, and data analytics products into a unified solution. This integration is designed to assist enterprises in streamlining workloads, thereby reducing the complexity, cost, and overhead associated with IT integration.

Fabric delivers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) experience, enabling developers to extract valuable insights from raw data and present them to business users. The platform is composed of seven core modules, which include data connectors, engineering tools, workflows for data science, and analytics tools.

The modules that constitute Fabric are Data Factory, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Science, Synapse Data Warehouse, Synapse Real-Time Analytics, Power BI, and Data Activator—all built on Microsoft’s data lake solution, OneLake.

Synapse Real-Time Analytics and Data Activator Merge Among the new updates, Microsoft has merged the Synapse Real-Time Analytics and Data Activator modules to create a new workload, named Real-Time Intelligence, which is now available in preview.

This new module combines analytics and activator functionalities while introducing additional features, such as a low-code interface, aimed at helping enterprises derive insights from real-time data.

“With Real-Time Intelligence, enterprise users can ingest highly granular streaming data, transform it dynamically, query it in real time for instant insights, and trigger actions—such as alerting a production manager about overheating equipment or rerunning jobs when data pipelines fail,” Microsoft explained.

The Real-Time Hub, which supports the new module, provides a centralized location for discovering, managing, and utilizing event streaming data from Fabric and other sources.

“From the Real-Time Hub, users can gain insights through data profiling, set alerts on changing conditions, and more, all within the hub itself,” the company noted.

Introduction of the Fabric Workload Development Kit Microsoft also unveiled the Fabric Workload Development Kit, a toolkit designed to assist developers in building interoperable applications within Fabric.

“Applications developed using this kit will function as native workloads within Fabric, providing users with a consistent experience directly in their Fabric environment without the need for manual intervention,” Microsoft stated. Developers can also publish and monetize these workloads through the Azure Marketplace.

Additionally, Microsoft is developing a workload hub experience within Fabric that will allow enterprise users to discover, add, and manage these workloads without leaving the platform.

Neo4j has already utilized this development kit to integrate its offering into Fabric.

Microsoft is also previewing two new features for developers: the API for GraphQL and user data functions.

“API for GraphQL is a flexible, powerful RESTful API that enables data professionals to access data from multiple sources within Fabric using a single query API,” Microsoft said, adding that this API can help enterprises reduce network overhead and improve response times.

User data functions, which are also in preview, are user-defined functions built for Fabric’s various data services, such as notebooks, pipelines, and event streams. These functions are designed to help developers create applications using diverse data sources, including lakehouses, data warehouses, and mirrored databases, by leveraging native code capabilities and custom logic.

Microsoft has also enhanced the Data Factory module within Fabric with a feature called data workflows, now in preview. This feature allows enterprises to define directed acyclic graphs (DAG) for orchestrating complex data workflows within Fabric.

“Data workflows are powered by Apache Airflow and are designed to help enterprises author, schedule, and monitor workflows or data pipelines using Python,” Microsoft said.

Copilot for Power BI Now Generally Available Microsoft announced that the first Copilot for Fabric has reached general availability. Introduced last year as part of Fabric, these generative AI-powered Copilots were designed to enhance the unified analytics platform.

The Copilot can now be accessed via the Power BI module within Fabric, allowing users to generate and summarize reports. The Copilots within other Fabric modules, such as Data Factory, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Science, and Synapse Data Warehouse, remain in preview.

These Copilots can also be used to create data flows, generate code, and build machine learning models using natural language processing.

Additionally, Microsoft has introduced a new Copilot for the Real-Time Intelligence module in preview, enabling enterprise users to query real-time data.

New Integrations with Snowflake and Databricks Microsoft announced further Fabric updates, including the introduction of OneLake shortcuts, which are in preview, to connect to data sources beyond Azure Data Lake Service Gen2.

“With an on-premises data gateway, you can now create shortcuts to Google Cloud Storage, Amazon S3, and S3-compatible storage buckets, whether on-premises or otherwise network-restricted,” Microsoft said.

The company is also partnering with Snowflake to enable full interoperability between Snowflake and OneLake.

“We are excited to announce future support for Apache Iceberg in Fabric OneLake and bi-directional data access between Snowflake and Fabric,” Microsoft said. This integration will allow users to analyze data within both platforms and access data across applications like Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and Azure AI Studio.

Microsoft also announced that Azure Databricks Unity Catalog tables will soon be accessible directly within Microsoft Fabric.

“From the Fabric portal, users can create and configure a new Azure Databricks Unity Catalog item in Fabric with just a few clicks, adding a full catalog, schema, or even individual tables,” Microsoft said.

When data is modified or when tables are added, removed, or renamed in Azure Databricks, the changes will automatically sync with Fabric, according to the company.

Furthermore, enterprise users will soon be able to access Fabric data items, such as lakehouses, as a catalog in Azure Databricks.

“While the data remains in OneLake, you can access and view data lineage and other metadata in Azure Databricks and leverage the full power of Unity Catalog,” Ulagaratchagan said. This feature will also extend Unity Catalog’s unified governance over data and AI into Azure Databricks Mosaic AI.