Microsoft has a rich history in data analytics, but the competitive landscape has pushed the company to innovate continuously. From SQL Server to Azure SQL Data Warehouse and now Microsoft Fabric, this paper explores Microsoft’s journey and the potential of its new technologies, Fabric and Direct Lake.
Greg Deckler provides a critical analysis of whether these innovations can help Microsoft regain its competitive edge against industry giants like Snowflake and Databricks.
Microsoft describes Direct Lake as “groundbreaking” technology, a new semantic model storage mode that is a “perfect” mix of DirectQuery and import modes. But can “groundbreaking” and “perfect” technology sway the tide of Microsoft’s fortunes within the data analytics market and help it keep competitors like Snowflake and Databricks at bay?
The paper details:
- Microsoft’s history in the enterprise data analytics space and provided an overview of Microsoft’s Fabric, Direct Lake, and Lakehouse technologies
- Fabric and Direct Lake Limitations and the impact of these limitations on their applicability within enterprise data analytics workloads
- The future of Fabric
About the Author
Greg Deckler is a Vice President at a global IT services firm who leads a practice specializing in Microsoft technologies such as Dynamics 365, Power BI, and Azure. He is a seven-time Microsoft MVP for Data Platform and the author of six books on analytics and Microsoft Power BI.
