Introduction to Microsoft Fabric and Business Central
Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end analytics solution with full-service capabilities including data movement, data lakes, data engineering, data integration, data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence—all backed by a shared platform providing robust data security, governance, and compliance. Your organization no longer needs to stitch together individual analytics services from multiple vendors. Instead, use a streamlined solution that’s easy to connect, onboard, and operate.
Note
For more information about the Microsoft Fabric release plan, see aka.ms/FabricRoadmap
The regular publishing of this roadmap will help you stay informed about how Microsoft Fabric will address your needs.
Where does Microsoft Fabric fit into Business Central analytics
Business Central comes with many out-of-the-box reports and data analysis capabilities such as financial reporting, open in Excel, and analysis mode on lists and queries. On top of this, it's easy to define Power BI reports that read data from standard and custom APIs, define Power BI metrics scorecards, and embed all of these directly in the Business Central client. But for customers with more advanced data science or business intelligence scenarios that require richer data engineering or data integration, Microsoft Fabric might be a good option.
OneLake
A key part of Microsoft Fabric offering is OneLake. OneLake is a single, unified, logical data lake for the whole organization. You can think of OneLake as the OneDrive for data. It provides you with data lake as a service without having to build it yourself. OneLake comes automatically with every Microsoft Fabric tenant with no infrastructure to manage. All the data, which lands in OneLake, automatically takes part in out-of-the-box data governance such as data lineage, data protection, certification, and catalog integration. It breaks down data silos by enabling different parts of the organization to work independently while still contributing to the same data lake.
Microsoft Fabric items store your data in OneLake in an open file format. For structured tabular data, this format is delta parquet. Delta parquet format allows every analytics engine in Microsoft Fabric to access the data from other analytics engines. This way, it allows flexibility for data practitioners to use the tools of your choice.