This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Community Hub.
Over the course of the last year I've had customers and colleagues ask "What exactly is Microsoft Fabric?", and decided there could be value in creating a presentation that takes a deep dive into that topic. The video below is a recorded version of a presentation I gave at SQL Saturday Minnesota 2023 reviewing a few decades of the data and analytics tools leading up to Fabric.
Most of you probably know that Power BI and Azure Synapse components are baked into Microsoft Fabric, but what else is in Fabric? What led up to Fabric? How do tools such as SQL Server, Azure ML, Purview, Excel, and Azure OpenAI fit in? What contributions (if any) were made by older tools such as ProClarity, Panorama, Datazen, and PerformancePoint? What are the differences between a Semantic Model, a Dataset, a Tabular Model, a Vertipaq Engine, a Cube and a Multidimensional Model? What are the operational benefits of Fabric compared to older architectures?
If you have experience with these older tools, or if you'd like to learn the history of Fabric to better understand the contemporary context and the future, hopefully you find the presentation valuable. "The Evolutionary History of Microsoft Fabric - Spreadsheets to Lakehouse" can be viewed below or at the following link: https://youtu.be/JCZnv3RhTJQ