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Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is an all-in-one analytics platform from Microsoft that unifies data engineering, data integration, data science, real-time analytics, and business intelligence into a single SaaS experience. Power BI is a core component of Microsoft Fabric and provides the business intelligence and reporting layer.

Brekz actively uses the Microsoft Fabric platform and holds the required licenses.

Purpose

Microsoft Fabric gives the Brekz data team a single environment to ingest, transform, model, and visualise data from all business systems — from the shop backend and ERP through to marketing and logistics platforms. Instead of managing separate tools for each stage of the data pipeline, everything lives in one governed, cloud-hosted platform.

Access & Permissions

License requirement

Access to Microsoft Fabric requires a Microsoft Fabric capacity license assigned to the workspace, plus a Power BI Pro or Fabric (free) per-user license depending on the workload. Brekz holds the required capacity licenses.

Role Description
Workspace Admin Full control: manage access, publish content, configure capacity.
Workspace Member Create and edit items within the workspace.
Workspace Contributor Publish content, but cannot manage access.
Workspace Viewer Read-only access to published reports and dashboards.

Requesting access

Contact the Brekz data team or your manager to request a workspace role. Access is granted through the Microsoft Fabric portal at app.fabric.microsoft.com.

Key Features & Components

  • Data Engineering (Lakehouse)

    Build and manage lakehouses using Apache Spark. Ingest raw data from any source, clean and transform it with notebooks or pipelines, and store it in Delta Lake format.

  • Data Factory (Pipelines)

    Orchestrate data movement and transformation with low-code pipelines. Replaces standalone Azure Data Factory for most ETL/ELT workflows.

  • Power BI (Business Intelligence)

    Create interactive dashboards, reports, and KPI scorecards. Share with stakeholders using row-level security and scheduled refresh.

  • Data Science (Notebooks)

    Run Python/R/Scala notebooks directly on Fabric compute. Train machine learning models and integrate predictions back into reports.

  • Real-Time Intelligence

    Stream and analyse event data in near real-time using KQL databases and Eventstream.

  • Data Warehouse

    A fully managed T-SQL warehouse for analysts who prefer SQL-based transformations and modelling without managing infrastructure.

How Brekz Uses Microsoft Fabric

  • Operational dashboards — Sales, logistics, and marketing dashboards are built in Power BI on top of data modelled in the Fabric lakehouse.
  • Data integration — Data from the shop backend, Exact Globe (ERP), Copernica (email marketing), and other sources is ingested via Data Factory pipelines.
  • Stakeholder reporting — Reports are distributed to relevant teams with controlled access through workspace roles and row-level security.
  • Ad-hoc analysis — The data team uses notebooks for exploratory analysis and one-off queries without needing a separate notebook environment.

Architecture Overview

graph TD
    A[Shop Backend] --> P[Data Factory Pipelines]
    B[Exact Globe ERP] --> P
    C[Copernica] --> P
    D[Logistics Systems] --> P
    P --> L[Lakehouse / Delta Lake]
    L --> W[Data Warehouse]
    L --> N[Notebooks / Data Science]
    W --> BI[Power BI Reports & Dashboards]
    L --> BI
    BI --> S[Stakeholders / Teams]

Microsoft Fabric Portal Microsoft Fabric Documentation Power BI Service