Frequently Asked Questions for Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end, cloud-based data analytics platform designed to bring all your data and analytics tools into one place.

It was created to solve a common challenge: data is often spread across multiple systems, tools, and teams, making it difficult to manage, analyse, and trust.

At the core of Fabric is OneLake, a central repository for your data. OneLake is like OneDrive for data, providing a single, unified location across your organisation. You can bring data into OneLake from a wide range of sources, including business systems, files, and cloud applications.

You can also use Shortcuts to access data stored in other locations without copying or moving it. This reduces data duplication and helps ensure everyone is working from the same, consistent data.

Fabric is delivered as a fully managed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform, meaning Microsoft handles the infrastructure, scalability, and performance.

What makes Fabric different is that it brings multiple analytics capabilities into a single, integrated platform—rather than requiring separate tools.

These capabilities work together across the full data lifecycle:

• Data Factory to ingest data from different sources

• Data storage and engineering to organise and prepare data

• Data Science and Machine Learning to analyse and build models

• Real-Time Analytics to work with live event data

• Power BI to visualise and share insights across the business

This allows data engineers, analysts, and business users to work in the same environment using the same data without needing to switch between disconnected tools.

To learn more about Microsoft Fabric, you can join one of our introductory webinars here: https://www.pa.com.au/events/how-to-unlock-value-from-your-data-with-microsoft-fabric-to-drive-better-decisions/

Microsoft Fabric is used by organisations to bring their data together, improve reporting, and build a more scalable and reliable analytics environment. 

In practice, most organisations don’t adopt Fabric just for a single use case. They typically use it to address a combination of challenges across reporting and analytics. 

Common uses of Microsoft Fabric include: 

Improving reporting and reducing manual processes 

Many organisations use Fabric to replace time-consuming, error-prone reporting processes that often rely on spreadsheets or multiple disconnected tools. 

By centralising data and using Fabric and Power BI, teams can create consistent reports and dashboards, making it easier to access insights to make decisions. 

Creating a single, trusted view of data 

A common issue in many organisations is having multiple versions of the same data across different systems and teams. 

Fabric brings data together into a central location (OneLake), helping ensure everyone works from a consistent, trusted source of information and improving confidence in reporting. 

Enabling self-service analytics 

In many businesses, reporting requests sit in IT backlogs, slowing down decision-making. 

Fabric empowers business users to access and explore data more easily, while still maintaining governance. This reduces reliance on IT for every report change and allows teams to answer their own questions faster. 

Improving data governance and security

When data is shared via spreadsheets, emails, or multiple reporting tools, it can introduce security and compliance risks.

Fabric provides a more controlled environment for managing and sharing data, helping organisations improve governance while still making data accessible to the right users.

Building a modern, scalable data platform

Fabric is also used to replace and modernise legacy data environments.

Organisations use it to replace fragmented tools or older data warehouse solutions with a single, cloud-based platform that can scale as data volumes and business needs grow.

Supporting advanced use cases and real-time analytics

Fabric also enables use cases beyond traditional reporting, such as:

• Analysing real-time data (e.g. operational or event-driven data)
• Supporting data science and machine learning use cases
• Enabling more advanced use cases such as predictive analytics.

Improving efficiency for data and BI teams

From a technical perspective, Fabric simplifies the development and management of data pipelines and analytics workflows.

By bringing multiple capabilities into one platform, teams spend less time integrating tools and more time delivering value from data.

Do you have a specific use case that you would like to discuss? Talk to a Fabric specialist today.

OneLake is the data foundation of Microsoft Fabric. It is a single, unified data hub to manage, access, and reuse your data, without the overhead of constantly moving or duplicating it. OneLake is like OneDrive, but for your organisation’s data instead of files. The benefits of OneLake include: 

• Single source of data
• Less duplication, less complexity
• Works across other cloud systems
• Organised and easy to navigate
• Built for reuse: Data is stored in open formats
• Access control and centralised data governance. 

For business users, OneLake isn’t about how data is stored; it’s about how easily you can access, trust, and use that data in your day-to-day work.

With OneLake, business users do not need to wait for data to be prepared; you can access what you need in one place, reducing reliance on IT. Business users work from a common view of the data, enabling more consistent reporting and better cross-team collaboration.

For data engineers, OneLake changes how you manage, organise, and serve data across the business. Data can be ingested once and reused across Fabric workloads, reducing pipeline duplication. Shortcuts minimise data movement by allowing access to data where it resides, reducing engineering effort and simplifying the architecture. Overall, OneLake reduces the heavy lifting so teams can focus on building and delivering reliable data solutions.

Microsoft Fabric is licensed using a capacity-based (SaaS) model, meaning you pay for a pool of computing resources across Fabric workloads. Instead of purchasing separate tools or licences for each feature, you pay for a shared pool of cloud computing resources that can be shared across Fabric workloads.

Costs are based on two main components:

• The amount of compute capacity you provision.
• The amount of data you store.

Capacities are available in different sizes, known as SKUs (e.g., F2, F4, F8). Higher SKUs provide greater performance and scale.

One of the key advantages of this model is simplified billing. Rather than managing multiple tools and vendors, compute capacity and storage are consolidated within the Fabric platform.

Storage in Fabric is provided through OneLake, Microsoft’s unified data lake, and is billed based on data stored and usage.

Power BI licensing still plays a role. Report creators require Power BI Pro (or Premium Per User). If your organisation is using a Fabric F64 or above capacity, users can view reports without needing individual Pro licenses. Where a Fabric capacity is lower than F64, viewers will also require Power BI Pro or Premium Per User licenses.

You can access the latest Fabric pricing and a price calculator on the Microsoft website here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/microsoft-fabric/

Microsoft Fabric includes Power BI as one of its core workloads. When you purchase Fabric capacity, you gain access to Power BI, along with other data and analytics capabilities such as data engineering, data warehousing, and data integration.

When we say "Fabric includes Power BI”, we are referring to the platform itself.

However, this does not remove the need for user licences. Power BI licences (such as Pro or Premium Per User) are still used to control who can create, share, and in some cases, access reports.

Refer to FAQ: Do I need to purchase a Power BI license if I purchase a Fabric license?

In most cases, yes. Power BI licences are still required, depending on how users interact with content.

• Report creators need a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) licence
• Viewers:
  • With a Fabric F64 or above capacity, users can view reports without a Pro license.
  • With a smaller Fabric capacity (ie F2 to F32), users will require a Power BI Pro or Premium Per User (PPU) licence.

In summary, Fabric provides the platform. Power BI licences control access.

No, you do not need Microsoft Fabric to use Power BI.

Power BI remains a standalone service that organisations can use independently for reporting and dashboards.

Microsoft Fabric builds on Power BI by adding broader data capabilities, such as data engineering, data warehousing and real-time intelligence, all within a single platform.

Organisations typically consider Fabric when Power BI alone is no longer enough to manage growing data complexity — such as combining multiple data sources, handling larger data volumes, or supporting more frequent and reliable data refreshes.