Updated: July 20, 2023 (July 9, 2023)

Microsoft Fabric and the Dataflow Components

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end data analytics cloud service that simplifies the deployment and use of several Microsoft data and analytics products and services. It combines several Azure services and Power BI into a cohesive offering that allows developers to work in specialized tools to perform their part of an analytics workload but enables them to share security and storage. (For a detailed discussion, see the illustration “Microsoft Fabric Components: A Technical Overview” on page 14 of the Aug. 2023 Update.)

Dataflow Components

Fabric provides two Dataflow components that both use Power Query Online to create basic extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. Developers have access to the same Get Data capabilities and the same M-language features to gather data from multiple sources, consolidate and cleanse the data, create dimensions and measures, and define an output dataset.

However, the two components differ in where they can write output data and other features:

Power BI Dataflow Gen 1 (shown on the right) is limited to writing data in Power BI controlled storage (datasets and datamarts), and the output data is only accessible through the Power BI service. Gen 1 is also available in Power BI stand-alone, outside of Fabric.

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