Microsoft Fabric, a new unified data platform, promises magic, but has gaps to fill...

Microsoft has released a unified data platform called Microsoft Fabric: the next step in a journey that started in 2022 with the release of its “Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform”, and an offering that Redmond says will let users get the “maximum value out of a single copy of data without data movement or duplication.”

Microsoft Fabric is underpinned by the new “OneLake”, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) that provides the underlying engine for this central hub for data discovery and management – and which lets users access the same data using multiple different tools like Apache Spark or Microsoft and Sybase’s T-SQL, for example.

Microsoft Fabric also lets AWS S3 buckets be virtualized into OneLake.

“Their data is mapped to the same unified namespace and can be ...