Exploring Microsoft Fabric: Transitioning from Power BI Premium

In a recent webinar, Paul Brady, Director of Data and AI at Trustmarque, provided an in-depth overview of Microsoft Fabric, focusing on its implications for organisations currently using Power BI Premium. The session covered various aspects of Fabric, including its pricing, functionalities, migration process, and adoption strategies. This article synthesises the key takeaways from the webinar, offering insights into the transition from Power BI Premium to Microsoft Fabric.

Understanding Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is a unified data platform for AI transformation, encompassing a wide range of functionalities such as data factory, analytics, databases, real-time intelligence, Power BI, industry solutions, and partner workloads. It aims to cover the full data needs of most organisations, providing a comprehensive solution for storing, collating, tidying, sharing, and automating data functions.

Key Features and Pricing

• Fabric Pro Licenses: Similar to Power BI Pro licenses, Fabric Pro licenses are required for report builders to publish and work in shared workspaces. The functionality remains the same, with only a change in name.
• Organisational Licenses: Unlike Power BI Premium licenses, Fabric licenses are purchased as Azure consumption, either by reserved instance or pay-as-you-go. The equivalent of a Power BI Premium node (AP1) is called an F64 in Fabric.
• Compute and Storage Costs: Fabric’s pricing is variable, based on compute and storage usage. Compute starts at F2 and goes up to 2048. The F64 SKU is equivalent to the depreciated P SKUs. Storage costs are nominal but should be monitored.

Migration Process

Paul outlined a straightforward migration process from Power BI Premium to Microsoft Fabric:

1. Identify End-of-Life Date: Determine the end-of-life date for your Power BI Premium SKU to plan the transition timeline.
2. Create Fabric Trial: For those new to Fabric, creating a trial capacity allows up to five people to explore its functionalities and familiarise themselves with the platform.
3. Training Paths: Microsoft offers two training paths, DP600 for Fabric analysts and DP700 for Fabric data engineers, to help users get acquainted with the platform.
4. Purchase Fabric: Set up billing subscriptions, resource groups, and reserved instances. Assign administrators and configure tenant settings to ensure proper governance.
5. Migrate Workspaces: Once the capacity has been made available and a capacity admin assigned then workspaces can be easily manually migrated from Power BI Premium to Fabric capacity in the workspace settings. This can also be done programmatically via PowerShell or using Microsoft semantic link-labs migration tools for bulk transfers of very large estates.

Adoption Strategies

Organisations are encouraged to make full use of Fabric’s capabilities by migrating other workloads, such as SQL Server on-premise, Azure sign-ups, Data Factory, and streaming analytics, into Fabric. This consolidation can optimize resource usage and reduce overall  data estate costs.

Conclusion

The transition from Power BI Premium to Microsoft Fabric offers organisations a robust and comprehensive data platform that integrates AI and advanced analytics. It is also a great opportunity to do some housekeeping. By following the outlined migration process and leveraging Fabric’s extensive functionalities, organisations can enhance their data management and analytics capabilities, driving innovation and efficiency.