How Power BI dominates the BI industry with the help of Microsoft Fabric

Introduction

In May 2023, Microsoft introduced a new product, ‘Microsoft Fabric,’ which they uncovered as a unified solution for enterprises’ end-to-end data analytics. This great move has not only solidified Microsoft’s position in the Data Analytics world but also did a word of good to Power BI in the market for data visualization tools. In the last few months, we have seen several big companies starting to migrate to Fabric from their existing data platforms mainly because of its comprehensive integration of various data tools and services into a single platform. This trend also resulted in migration to Power BI from existing data visualization tools.

Let’s see the factors that make Fabric stand apart from the rest of the market and also how it, in turn, helps Power BI rule the BI and visualization market.

Power BI's Domination

Seamless integration with Power BI: Power BI is basically incorporated as one of the components of Fabric. As a result, if your data is hosted in the fabric environment, then you can easily see the real-time insights from your data using the Power BI reports and dashboards. More importantly, with the advent of OneLake in Fabric, there is also no need to manage multiple copies of your data. It is always centrally stored and managed. It provides a single and unified storage for all, where sharing of data is easy with centrally enforced security. Even if your data is outside of Fabric environments, with Fabric, Power BI users can easily connect, combine, and transform the data from multiple sources to get a consolidated view of the business data.

Copilot with Power BI: One of the biggest challenges enterprise Power BI users are facing is the lack of individual copilot licenses for Power BI. However, if you are using Microsoft Fabric F64 SKU or a higher version in your organization, then you will be able to use Copilot in Power BI, which automatically creates reports with the help of your suggestions.

Dealing with Large Data: When it comes to dealing with large data in Power BI, there is a question as to what storage mode must be adopted in Power BI. If you go with ‘Import’ mode, then you will face storage issues after a certain limit. If you go with ‘Direct Query’, with a large dataset, it may result in latency issues on the reporting front. The multi-cloud data lake called OneLake from Fabric is important. It can store large amounts of data in different formats and also help reflect the changes in Power BI reports with minimal latency.

Performance: As discussed above, if the data is stored in OneLake in Fabric, it will significantly boost the performance of your Power BI reports. The query responses and data refreshes become much faster.

Cost Benefit: Using Power BI with Fabric helps in saving a lot of costs. As mentioned in the first point, Power BI is one of the components of Fabric. That means when you purchase the Fabric SKUs, the users will be able to use Power BI as a part of that, along with other data tools like Data Factory, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Warehouse, etc., to name a few. However, please note that if you want someone to author reports and deploy them to end uses, you may need an additional PRO license, depending on your requirements.

Conclusion

Microsoft Fabric is basically trying to provide a single and unified platform for data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts. The fact that the different data tools/components also share the same pool of resources is an added advantage in terms of costs incurred. This has fueled the increase in the migration to Power BI from various other existing data visualization tools.

About CloudThat

Established in 2012, CloudThat is a leading Cloud Training and Cloud Consulting services provider in India, USA, Asia, Europe, and Africa. Being a pioneer in the cloud domain, CloudThat has special expertise in catering to mid-market and enterprise clients from all the major cloud service providers like AWS, Microsoft, GCP, VMware, Databricks, HP, and more. Uniquely positioned to be a single source for both training and consulting for cloud technologies like Cloud Migration, Data Platforms, Microsoft Dynamics 365, DevOps, IoT, and the latest technologies like AI/ML, it is a top-tier partner with AWS and Microsoft, winning more than 8 awards combined in 11 years. Recently, it was recognized as the ‘Think Big’ partner from AWS and won the Microsoft Superstars FY 2023 award in Asia & India. Leveraging its position as a leader in the market, CloudThat has trained 650k+ professionals in 500+ cloud certifications and delivered 300+ consulting projects for 100+ corporates in 28+ countries.