Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft's unified data analytics platform, combining data engineering, data warehousing, real-time analytics, and Power BI reporting into one integrated SaaS product built on Azure. It ranks #15 in trending tech at roughly 2.4% usage share. Its trending pull is consolidation: teams that previously had to separately provision and stitch together Azure Data Factory, Synapse, and Power BI can now do all of it inside one workspace with a shared Delta Lake storage layer (OneLake).
Fabric notebooks run Spark under the hood, so you write ordinary PySpark against Delta tables stored in a Fabric Lakehouse.
from pyspark.sql import functions as F
# read a Delta table from the Fabric Lakehouse
df = spark.read.format("delta").load("Tables/sales")
result = (
df.filter(F.col("region") == "West")
.groupBy("product")
.agg(F.sum("revenue").alias("total_revenue"))
.orderBy(F.desc("total_revenue"))
)
# write results back as a managed Delta table
result.write.format("delta").mode("overwrite").saveAsTable("product_revenue_west")Fabric is entirely browser-based — there's no local install. You start from a Microsoft Fabric or Power BI tenant.
1. Sign up for a Microsoft Fabric trial at app.fabric.microsoft.com
2. Create a Workspace, then a Lakehouse inside it
3. Upload or connect a data source (files, database, or Dataflow)
4. Open a new Notebook attached to the Lakehouse and write PySpark/SQL
5. Build a Power BI report directly on top of the resulting tables