News

Copilot for Microsoft Fabric Now Generally Available

• By Chris Paoli
• May 24, 2024

Microsoft's far-reaching Fabric data platform is getting a host of enhancements, including the general availability of its own Copilot AI assistant.

Announced during Microsoft's Build 2024 conference last week, the commercial availability of Copilot for Fabric will make it easier for users to create dataflows, generate code, build machine learning models and visualize results using natural language.

Copilot for Fabric will first be rolled out at as a Power BI capability to customers with Power BI Premium capacity (P1 or higher) or Fabric capacity (F64 or higher). In the coming weeks, these users will get the ability to generate "reports and summarize your insights into narrative summaries in seconds," according to a blog post by Arun Ulagaratchagan, corporate vice president of Azure Data at Microsoft.

Fabric is also getting a new Real-Time Intelligence workload. This workload in Fabric, currently in preview, enhances Synapse Real-Time Analytics and Data Activator, allowing users to analyze high-volume event streaming data in real-time. There's also an accompanying Real-Time Hub that helps manage event streaming data from various sources.

"From ingestion to transformation, querying, and taking immediate action, Real-Time Intelligence is an end-to-end experience that enables seamless handling of real-time data without the need to land it first," Ulagaratchagan said. "With Real-Time Intelligence, you can ingest streaming data with high granularity, dynamically transform streaming data, query data in real-time for instant insights, and trigger actions like alerting a production manager when equipment is overheating or rerunning jobs when the data pipeline fails."

More details about Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric are available in this blog.

On the development front, Microsoft introduced the new Microsoft Fabric Workload Development Kit, also in preview. This kit enables developers to create applications that integrate into Fabric. Additionally, the new API for GraphQL and user data functions simplify accessing and managing data across Fabric's services, enhancing the development of custom applications and workflows.

Microsoft is also updating the Data Factory module with a preview of data workflows in the module. Data workflows enable customers to define Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) files for complex data workflow orchestration within Fabric. Powered by Apache Airflow, data workflows are designed to help users author, schedule and monitor workflows or data pipelines using Python.

Finally, Microsoft announced that Fabric has expanded interoperability with Snowflake and Azure Databricks, enhancing data access and analysis capabilities. The integration with Snowflake allows for bidirectional data access, while the Azure Databricks Unity Catalog integration simplifies the management and visibility.