Every day, businesses probe vast data oceans to extract pearls of insight from the depths. This can be a challenging task depending on the complexity of the data, a lack of skilled personnel, inadequate tools, or difficulties in integrating data from various sources. That’s why businesses of all sizes turn to Microsoft Fabric, a powerful cloud-based platform that unites our top analytics products—Power BI, Azure Data Factory, and Azure Synapse—to harness the power of data in a single, AI-powered environment.
The purpose of this blog is to help enterprise customers get the most out of Fabric through a series of learning modules, exercises, and live workshops with Azure experts. Our goal is to ensure a streamlined, intuitive experience to help your organization accelerate your data potential with Microsoft Fabric.
Take part in our Microsoft Fabric Cloud Skills Challenge, a free interactive learning experience built on task-based achievements to help advance your technical skills and prepare for Microsoft role-based certifications. Running through Jan. 15, 2024, take the challenge to benchwork your progress against your peers and develop marketable skills to advance your career.
Avoid the pitfalls of ineffective data analysis
Any enterprise that fails to effectively analyze its data may miss out on valuable insights, potentially leading to reduced growth or even a decline in business. Reliable data analytics provide your business with the insights necessary to make informed, data-driven decisions. This helps in optimizing operations, identifying growth opportunities, and mitigating risks effectively. Data analytics can also help enterprises identify inefficiencies and areas where cost savings are possible. By analyzing data, organizations can streamline processes, reduce waste, and allocate resources more efficiently.
The benefits stretch even further. Effective data analysis enables businesses to gather and analyze customer data, allowing them to personalize products, services, and marketing strategies, ultimately improving customer satisfaction and loyalty. Enterprises that harness and analyze such customer data can also respond more quickly to market changes and emerging trends, leading to innovative new products and services and giving them an edge over competitors.
Join a community of data experts and peer learners
We believe getting skilled for Microsoft Fabric is the best way to begin realizing a substantial business edge through insightful data analysis, and we have a network of Azure experts and a community of learners around the globe to help you get started. With our Learn Live series, Get Started with Microsoft Fabric, Fabric professionals will guide you in lessons on every aspect of the platform. These engaging learning experiences allow you to ask questions to experts in the field, get hands-on experience with technology, and network with other learners. It’s also a great way to stay up to date on the latest Fabric developments.
The entire, eight-episode Fabric Learn Live series is now available to watch on demand. The first session, titled Get Started with End-to-End Analytics and Lakehouses, provides an overview of Fabric and how you can use it for your analytics needs. You’ll learn about lakehouses, which take the analytical power of data warehouses and merge it with the flexible storage capabilities of data lakes. By the end you should be able to create your own lakehouse in Fabric and know how to ingest data to create files and tables for easy reference.
With each subsequent Learn Live session—including lessons about Apache Spark, Delta Lake tables, Data Factory pipelines, and much more—you’ll have the opportunity to earn badges and prepare for certifications. Head over to the Microsoft Fabric Learn Live page to get started.
Learning any new skill is always better with support. With the Microsoft Fabric Community, you can connect with your peers to ask questions, explore creative solutions, and share ideas about Fabric with community members and product experts. In addition, you can start your own user group or attend a local, in-person event related to Fabric skilling.
Go your own speed with our series of learning paths
Looking to maximize your skilling potential for Microsoft Fabric at your own pace? With our series of self-guided learning paths, you’ll discover how this all-in-one platform can meet your enterprise’s analytics needs by identifying trends and patterns in your data and using that to make strategic business decisions. The courses are designed for data analysts, data engineers, and data scientists who want to learn how to use Microsoft Fabric to build and manage data pipelines, analyze data, and comply with regulations.
For a comprehensive overview of Fabric’s vast capabilities and to discover how Microsoft Fabric can meet your enterprise's analytics needs in one platform, check out our Get Started with Microsoft Fabric learning path. Explore the inner workings of core technologies—including lakehouses, Apache Spark, Delta Lake tables, and more—and identify how you can use each for your analytics needs. There’s also a lesson on how your IT team can work to enable Fabric at the tenant or capacity level for either the entire organization or specific user groups to utilize. (For more on enabling Fabric across your enterprise, you can also check out this blog with step-by-step instructions.)
Additional learning paths go in-depth on core Fabric concepts and technologies:
- Implement a Lakehouse with Microsoft Fabric: Lakehouses merge data lake storage flexibility with data warehouse analytics. Microsoft Fabric offers a lakehouse solution for comprehensive analytics on a single SaaS platform.
- Ingest data with Microsoft Fabric: Data ingestion is crucial in analytics. Microsoft Fabric's Data Factory offers Dataflows (Gen2) for visually creating multi-step data ingestion and transformation using Power Query Online.
- Implement data science and machine learning for AI in Microsoft Fabric: In Microsoft Fabric, data scientists can manage data, notebooks, experiments, and models while easily accessing data from across the organization and collaborating with their fellow data professionals.
- Implement Real-Time Analytics with Microsoft Fabric: Analysis of real-time data streams is a critical capability for any modern data analytics solution. You can use the Real-Time Analytics capabilities of Microsoft Fabric to ingest, query, and process streams of data.
Data analysis with Kusto Query Language: Learn about the basics of Kusto Query Language (KQL), and the various Microsoft products that use it.
After completing the self-guided learning paths, put your newfound skills to the test! We recently launched an enhanced portfolio of Microsoft Credentials, including the new Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate certification, starting in January 2024. Additional Microsoft Applied Skills credentials, covering scenarios like real-time analytics, data lakehouses, and data warehouses using Microsoft Fabric, will be released in the coming months.
Begin realizing the business benefits of data analysis with Fabric
Microsoft Fabric offers a comprehensive suite of services for any enterprise looking for an efficient way to collect, store, analyze, and visualize large amounts of data from various sources. In addition to helping you to improve decision-making, increase agility, and inspire innovation, integrating the cloud-based Microsoft Fabric platform means your organization doesn’t have to invest in hardware or software infrastructure.
To learn more about how Fabric’s robust features can transform your data analysis, visit our Official Collection page, Microsoft Fabric: Analytics in the Age of AI, join our ongoing Learn Live series, or dive into in the self-guided learning paths.