Medallion Architecture in Fabric High Level Organisation Design Pattern

Microsoft Fabric is excellent!  We do still need to follow good practices we have been using for years, such as making data accessible and secure.   Possibly the most used architecture for Big Data is the Medallion Architecture pattern, where data is ingested normally in a fairly raw format into the bronze layer, then transformed into more meaningful and usable information. Lastly, the gold layer exposes data relationally using semantic models to reporting tools.

Overview: This document outlines my attempt to organise enterprise data into MS Fabric using a Medallion Architecture based on Fabric Workspaces.  Shortcuts are better than imported data, but it does depend on factors such as what the data source is, what data we need, how up-to-date the data is and performance requirements from the systems involved.

The reports and semantic models can get data from other workspaces at any of the medallion layers.  This architecture lends itself well to using the new Direct Lake Query mode.

Summary of a Design used by a Large Enterprise:

Medallion architecture using Fabric Workspaces.

Microsoft Fabric High-level architecture

Overview: Microsoft Fabric is an end-to-end analytics platform that unifies data movement, storage, processing, and visualisation. It integrates multiple services into a single SaaS experience, enabling organisations to manage their entire data lifecycle in one place.  One Lake is at the core of MS Fabric.

Image 1. One page High-Level Architecture of MS Fabric. 

PowerBI Pro for Licencing & Understanding the two query options

Problem: Require reporting and dashboards quickly and securely at a reasonable price.
Hypothesis: There are great reporting solutions, and two other enterprise-leading products are Tableau and Qlik. However, these can be expensive to install and pay for licencing.

Proposed Resolution: PowerBI Pro (PowerBI Premium is for larger enterprise solutions) is a cloud-based solution that can connect to multiple data sources and on-prem using the Gateway. E5 licences include the PowerBI Pro licence for creating and publishing reports. An E3 licence can get an add-on for about £7.50 per month. This is only needed by the people creating the reports.
 
To paraphrase "You can embed the report (not dashboard) on a SharePoint web page and share it with company users. You will then only be needing one licence to publish the report. The downside of this option is there is no builtin security for the report. Anyone who has access to the web page can access the report."

Disclaimer: These are my thoughts and understanding, please check your licencing with Microsoft and a licencing professional.

Updated: Nov 2022

3 Power BI licence types:

1. Free (per user)
2. Pro (per user per month) $
3. Premium (resource/capacity based)  $$$ - 2 options

Choose depending on your usage pattern/scenarios. Premium is great for enterprise-level but out of the range for most SME businesses.  Feature and pricing comparison

Creating Reports

When you create a Power BI report, a semantic model is created within the Power BI Service.  This shows the data you can access, and using DAX queries binds the report to the underlying queried data.

There are two ways to access the data:

1. Import Mode (Data is periodically brought into the Power BI Dataset.  Reporting is fast, but there is a time lag until the data pull is refreshed); or 

2. Direct Mode (queries the underlying system, so data is up to date, but it's slow and can hammer the source systems).

Options for Querying Data from Power BI (Pre MS Fabric)

Last updated: Jan 2025