Microsoft announced a host of additions to its Microsoft Fabric data analytics platform at Microsoft Ignite 2024 in Chicago on Tuesday, including Fabric Databases. The innovations are part of Microsoft’s reimagining of the pillars of Microsoft Fabric with a focus on providing AI-powered tools for data projects and delivering an open and AI-ready data lake.

The company launched the SaaS-based end-to-end data platform a year ago as a pre-integrated and optimized environment to help data teams work together without getting mired in infrastructure and configuration settings. On Tuesday, Microsoft upped the ante with Fabric Databases, which it calls “a new class of cloud databases that brings a world-class transactional database natively to Microsoft Fabric for app developers.” Fabric Databases enables autonomous databases that provision in seconds.

“With the addition of Fabric Databases, Fabric now brings together both transactional and analytical workloads, creating a truly unified data platform,” Arun Ulag, corporate vice president of Azure Data, said in a blog post Tuesday.

Ulag explains further that Fabric databases, which he says can be provisioned in seconds, are secured by default via cloud authentication and database encryption and include vector search, RAG support, and Azure AI integration.

Developers will be able to use Microsoft Copilot within Fabric to “translate natural language queries into SQL and get inline code completion alongside code fixes and explanations,” Ulag says.

Fabric Databases is currently in preview. SQL database is the first offering available in Fabric, though Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Database for PostgreSQL are on the roadmap.

According to Microsoft, SQL database in Fabric will enable customers to build intelligent apps with data automatically replicated to OneLake, where it can be acted on by Fabric’s analytical engines, enabling capabilities such as RAG. The offering also enables developers to support continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) using GitHub integration for source control.

More for Fabric

Other enhancements to Fabric include the OneLake catalog, an evolution of the OneLake data hub for exploring, managing, and governing the Fabric data estate.

Microsoft has also announced the general availability of Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, which provides pro-dev and no-code tools for ingesting high-volume streaming data. Dener Motorsports has been leveraging Real-Time Intelligence to stream data from its race cars during races, giving engineers access to that data in real-time. Microsoft also announced the preview of new capabilities including Fabric events and enhancements to Eventstreams and Eventhouses.

The company also announced the general availability of sustainability data solutions in Microsoft Fabric to provide a single place for environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data needs, as well as the general availability of API for GraphQL, an API for accessing data from multiple sources in Fabric with a single query API. Microsoft has also made Azure SQL DB mirroring generally available.

Microsoft also previewed a number of additions to Fabric, including Copilot in Fabric for data pipelines in Fabric Data Factory, integration with Esri ArcGIS for advanced spatial analytics, and open mirroring in OneLake, which enables any application or data provider to write change data directly into a mirrored database within Fabric.

A soon-to-be released preview of AI skill enhancements was also announced. These enhancements will include, among other things, a more conversational experience and support for semantic models and Eventhouse KQL databases.

AI skills will also be integrated with agent runtime for Azure AI Foundry, enabling developers to use AI skills as a core knowledge source, according to the company.

Source: https://www.cio.com/article/3608454/microsoft-reimagines-fabric-with-focus-on-ai.html