Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics solution that covers everything from data movement to data science, and business intelligence with Power BI. It offers a comprehensive suite of services, including data lake, data engineering, SQL and data integration, all in one place.
This is a hand-on introduction to Fabric. During the course we will build the components of a data analysis system in Fabric: data engineering, data science and Business intelligence with Power BI.
This is a foundation course. Attendees do not need any prior knowledge of Microsoft Fabric or Power BI.
Course Duration: 3 days
Outline
Introduction: What is Fabric? What are the advantages of Fabric. What problems does it solve?
Whirlwind demo First look at the main components of Microsoft Fabric.
Fabric concepts and terms explained: workspace, lakehouse and OneLake, warehouse, semantic model, Power BI, Azure Data Factory (ADF), delta parquet files, shortcuts, … The languages and tools: SQL, Python and Spark
Hands-on tutorial
This main part of the course is a guided hands-on tutorial that briefly covers many of the tasks we can do in Fabric. We will
- explore a workspace (a folder for Fabric components),
- create a lakehouse (a repository for structured and unstructured data),
- create a dataflow to clean and shape sample data sourced from a CSV file then load into a table in a Fabric lakehouse,
- run some simple SQL queries to analyse and summarise the data in this table,
- explore the Power BI semantic model of these tables,
- improve the semantic model: create a Power BI measure in the data model,
- visualise the data with Power BI,
- write a Python script to load data into a lakehouse, and visualise that data with Python,
- load data into the lakehouse with an ADF pipeline,
- create a SQL Warehouse,
- use SQL to load data into tables in the warehouse then shape and summarise the data into other tables
Technical pre-requisites
Since Fabric is a SaaS solution, attendees only need a browser and access to the internet. However, they need to be registered on the classroom Fabric tenant before the course. They will need to provide a work email address, and before the course run a test to check that they have access (this will take 15 – 30 minutes and is part of the learning)