
Do you actually need Microsoft Fabric, or is Power BI enough?
When Power BI is genuinely enough, when Microsoft Fabric is worth starting early, and what a capacity really costs. A practitioner’s decision framework.

When Power BI is genuinely enough, when Microsoft Fabric is worth starting early, and what a capacity really costs. A practitioner’s decision framework.

Walk into almost any bank, credit union, or insurer and you find the same problem: every system reports its own totals and reconciling them burns days. Here is the Microsoft Fabric reference architecture that fixes it, and why the certified semantic model, not the plumbing, is the product.

Most data teams considering Microsoft Fabric training go straight to DP-600 or DP-700. There is a quieter catalog underneath it that fits most teams better: one-day courses (DP-601, DP-602) and Microsoft Applied Skills credentials. Here is when to pick which.

Naming conventions are the thing every Fabric project starts with good intentions and abandons by month three. The fix is not better discipline. It is AI as a deterministic enforcement layer. Here is the standard I use on every project, in five rules.