Topic hub
The platform: OneLake, lakehouse and warehouse, Data Factory, Spark, real-time, CI/CD and migrations.
66 articles by the Solv Systems team
Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft's software-as-a-service analytics platform. It puts data integration, data engineering, data warehousing, real-time intelligence, data science and Power BI on one capacity, with OneLake as the shared storage layer underneath all of them. That breadth is why it is hard to learn from product pages alone: the useful questions are about which workload to pick, how the pieces fit together, and what breaks when you get it wrong.
This hub collects everything we have written about Fabric as a platform. It starts with the basics, what Fabric is and what OneLake does, then covers the engineering choices: lakehouse or warehouse, medallion layers, mirroring, shortcuts, Data Factory pipelines, Spark and Delta tuning, Eventhouse and KQL, and the CI/CD and deployment patterns that make a workspace safe to change. There are also guides to the Fabric exams, the major conference announcements, industry use cases and the practical questions clients ask us, such as how long a migration from Synapse takes and what a Fabric consultant actually does.
Pricing, capacity sizing and licensing have their own hub, as do data governance and security, Databricks comparisons, and Copilot and AI agents. Each article below is written by the consultants who build these platforms for clients in the UK, South Africa and the United States.
Newest first.
Solv Systems is now a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Data & AI (Azure). What the designation covers, which certifications count, and what it means for Fabric and Power BI clients.
Solv Systems has qualified as a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Infrastructure (Azure). What the pathway requires, which certifications count, and why it matters for data platforms.
Fabric Runtime 2.0 brings Spark 4.1, Delta Lake 4.2 and Python 3.13. What changes, what can break, how to choose a runtime per workspace, and a safe upgrade plan.
dbt jobs are now generally available in Microsoft Fabric. How they run, which adapters they support, where they fit next to pipelines and notebooks, and how to migrate.
Microsoft's Dataflows Upgrade Wizard moves Gen1 to Gen2 in place, keeping IDs, schedules and connections. What it does, what it doesn't, and how to plan the upgrade.
Microsoft announced Business Central mirroring to Fabric at FabCon Europe 2026. How it works, its preview status and limits, and when API extraction is still the better route.
Fabric Business Events reached general availability in September 2026. What a business event is, how publishers, consumers and Activator fit together, what it costs, and where to start.
A Fabric deployment plan (preview) sets deployment order and runs notebooks or pipelines mid-deploy; branch workspaces are now GA. How they fit together, and the limits to plan around.
Fabric workspace monitoring now centralises telemetry, the Monitor hub is rebuilt and an operations agent investigates failed pipelines. What to switch on, what it costs and what to watch.
The OneLake Table Read API (preview) lets agents and apps read Delta and Iceberg tables as Arrow with RLS and CLS enforced. How it works, what it costs, and where delegated shortcuts and policies fit.
Five personal FabCon Europe 2026 takeaways from Nick de Vrye, each tied to a concrete change in how Solv. Systems scopes, sizes, builds and governs client work.
Planning in Microsoft Fabric puts budgets, forecasts and scenarios on the Power BI semantic models you already trust. What it is, its status, the FabCon Europe 2026 additions and how to adopt it.
Fabric IQ in Microsoft Copilot is generally available, Fabric Apps reach Power BI Pro, and F0 with on-demand billing is coming. The FabCon Europe 2026 announcements, their status and what to do next.
A practical DP-600 study guide: the skills measured and their weightings, what to study in each area, a six-week plan, exam-day tips, and how it differs from DP-700.
A practical DP-700 study guide: who the Fabric Data Engineer exam is for, the three skill areas and weightings, what to study in each, a six-week plan, exam tips and how it differs from DP-600.
A buyer's guide to choosing a Microsoft Fabric consultancy: the questions that separate delivery firms from sales firms, red flags, comparing proposals, and boutique versus global SI.
Retail runs on high-volume, fast-moving data: sales, stock, e-commerce, footfall. How Fabric's lakehouse, real-time and AI layers map to retail's actual problems, and where the value lands first.
Healthcare data is sensitive, siloed and scrutinised - and the sector needs analytics more than most. How Fabric fits clinical and operational data, compliance first.
Most data strategies are shelfware: fifty slides, no owners, no sequence. The version that works: decisions to improve, foundations to fix, a platform bet, a quarterly sequence.
Warehouses gave us trust, lakes gave us scale, and the lakehouse claims both. What each architecture actually is, the trade-offs that drove the evolution, and what to build in 2026.
Extract-transform-load became extract-load-transform when storage got cheap and engines got fast. Why modern platforms default to ELT, and where classic ETL still earns its keep.
Every number on every dashboard arrived through a pipeline: extraction, movement, transformation, orchestration and monitoring. What pipelines are and what good ones share.
The API for GraphQL exposes lakehouse, warehouse and SQL data as a typed GraphQL endpoint in minutes - no service layer to build. What it does, where it fits, and its limits as an app backend.
Most slow Fabric estates are slow for boring reasons: small files, unmaintained tables, oversized sessions. The basics - V-Order, OPTIMIZE, VACUUM, partitioning - with judgement.
Bronze, silver and gold layers are the default shape of a modern lakehouse. What each layer is actually for, how to lay them out in Fabric, and the mistakes that turn medallion into mud.
Logs, events, IoT streams and clickstreams break SQL-first architectures. Eventhouse is Fabric's answer: KQL databases built for time-stamped data at interactive speed.
OneLake is the single, tenant-wide data lake every Fabric workload reads and writes. What it actually is, how One Copy works, and why it changes the economics of a Microsoft data platform.
Shortcuts make data in ADLS, S3, GCS, Dataverse or another workspace appear inside your lakehouse without copying it. How they work, and the performance and governance caveats.
Mirroring replicates operational databases - Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Snowflake, Databricks catalogs and more - into OneLake continuously, no pipelines to build. How it works and when to choose it.
Fabric offers both a lakehouse and a warehouse, both on OneLake, both queryable with SQL. The real differences - engines, write patterns, skills - and a decision rule that has survived real projects.
Semantic link lets Fabric notebooks read Power BI semantic models: measures, relationships and all. Why that unlocks model validation, data science on governed metrics, and BI estate automation.
Dashboards tell you what happened; Real-Time Intelligence tells you now, and Activator acts on it. How Fabric's streaming stack pairs with AI to detect, alert and trigger without a human watching.
Fabric ships a full data science workload: Spark notebooks, MLflow experiments, model registry and AutoML, with predictions landing in OneLake for Power BI. What it covers, and when you need more.
Fabric's AI functions put summarisation, classification, translation and sentiment into a single call inside notebooks and dataflows. Where they fit, and how to use them without surprises.
Not yet, for a lot of organisations. The symptoms that mean you have outgrown datasets alone, and an honest test for whether you are actually there.
Regulatory reporting that survives an audit, lineage you can produce on request, and access control that separates desks and entities properly. What is different about building here.
Joining MES, ERP and quality data so OEE reconciles with finance. Why shop-floor data defeats most reporting projects, and what to do differently.
Cost-to-serve across fragmented systems, network visibility that is actually current, and an honest view of where streaming earns its cost and where it does not.
Environment strategy is the thing every serious Fabric implementation hits in month two. What deployment rules can and cannot handle, and where Git integration ends and pipelines begin.
The comparison is settled and you have decided. This is the sequence that actually works: what maps to what, what to move first, and the decisions that bite six weeks in.
Engagement shapes, what a good consultant delivers in the first ninety days, and the questions worth asking before you sign anything.
Snowflake sells elastic compute you pay for by the second. Fabric sells a capacity your whole organisation shares. That single difference drives most of the decision.
These two get compared constantly and they do different jobs. One activates customer data inside Salesforce; the other is your analytics platform. Most organisations that ask end up needing both.
When every report ships with a caveat and every figure gets double-checked, poor data quality is taxing the whole business. How a governance and quality framework rebuilds trust.
If your reports describe last month instead of today, every decision carries a built-in delay. How real-time dashboards on Microsoft Fabric match data freshness to decision speed.
Your ERP, CRM and operations systems each hold a fragment of the truth, so cross-functional questions become research projects. How Microsoft Fabric unifies siloed data into one governed platform.
Integrating Dynamics 365 Business Central with Microsoft Fabric unlocks unified analytics, AI-ready data, and Power BI reporting across your entire business estate.
Integrating HubSpot with Microsoft Fabric brings CRM and marketing data into your unified analytics estate, enabling Power BI reporting and AI across sales and marketing.
The 2026 Microsoft Fabric vs Azure Synapse comparison: where Microsoft stands on Synapse, what each Synapse workload maps to in Fabric, how pricing differs, and when staying put is still sensible.
Microsoft Build 2026 delivered announcements across Fabric, AI models, silicon, and developer tooling. Here is what the key announcements mean for your data and AI strategy.
Rayfin is Microsoft's open-source SDK and CLI that lets developers and coding agents generate enterprise-grade application backends deployed to Microsoft Fabric, with the app data landing governed in OneLake.
Microsoft IQ, announced at Build 2026, is the context layer that grounds AI agents in enterprise and world knowledge through four pillars: Work IQ, Fabric IQ, Foundry IQ and Web IQ. Here is what it is and what it demands of your data estate.
Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft's unified data platform combining data engineering, warehousing, and Power BI under OneLake. Here's what it is and how it can benefit your organisation.
Four approaches to integrating ArcGIS with Microsoft Fabric, covering GeoAnalytics for Fabric, REST API extraction, CRS discipline, and cross-system spatial analytics.
Three approaches to integrating monday.com with Microsoft Fabric, wrapped in a metadata-driven architecture built to absorb board schema variability, column complexity, and regulated environments.
Four approaches to integrating Salesforce with Microsoft Fabric, from Data Cloud Zero-Copy to REST and Bulk APIs, in a metadata-driven architecture built for custom-field sprawl.
Four practical approaches to getting Odoo ERP data into Microsoft Fabric, wrapped in a metadata-driven medallion architecture that holds up to Odoo customisation and module growth.
How we built a metadata-driven medallion architecture in Microsoft Fabric to land 39 Shopify tables in production, using one parameterised pipeline instead of 40 brittle copies.
FabCon 2026 delivered the largest set of Microsoft Fabric announcements to date. Here are the seven that carry real strategic weight, and what they mean for organisations running Fabric today.
Microsoft Fabric has reached $2 billion in annual recurring revenue with 60% year-on-year growth. Here's what is actually driving enterprise adoption, and what it means for organisations evaluating the platform.
Fabric's Remote MCP Server lets AI agents connect directly to your data environment through a standardised, governed interface. Here's what it is and why it matters for enterprise AI deployments.
Microsoft acquired Osmos in January 2026 to embed autonomous data engineering into Fabric. Here's what it means for data teams spending too much time preparing data and not enough time using it.
Microsoft Fabric's Database Hub, now in public preview, unifies management of Azure SQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Cosmos DB and SQL database in Fabric into a single control plane: here is what it means for your enterprise database strategy.
Explore application lifecycle management in Microsoft Fabric. Learn how Git integration and deployment pipelines work together to provide version control and release management.
Fabric Data Factory explained: what pipelines, Dataflow Gen2, copy job and mirroring each do, how gateways and orchestration work, how it differs from Azure Data Factory, and how it is billed.
Satya Nadella live in Munich. Our key takeaways from Microsoft AI Tour Munich covering Microsoft Fabric as a unified data platform, Agent 365 for AI security, and GitHub Copilot CLI for development teams.
Articles filed under another topic that also cover Microsoft Fabric.
We design, build and run Fabric platforms for clients in the UK, South Africa and the US. Book a free 30-minute call to talk through your architecture, migration or first workload.