Explore data analytics in Microsoft Fabric

In this exercise you’ll explore data ingestion and analytics in a Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse.

This lab will take approximately 25 minutes to complete.

Note: You’ll need a Microsoft Fabric license to complete this exercise. See Getting started with Fabric for details of how to enable a free Fabric trial license. You will need a Microsoft school or work account to do this. If you don’t have one, you can sign up for a trial of Microsoft Office 365 E3 or higher.

The first time you use any Microsoft Fabric features, prompts with tips may appear. Dismiss these.

Create a workspace

Before working with data in Fabric, create a workspace with the Fabric trial enabled.

  1. Sign into Microsoft Fabric at https://app.fabric.microsoft.com.

  2. In the menu bar, at the bottom left, switch to the Data Engineering experience.

    Screenshot of the experience switcher menu.

  3. In the menu bar on the left, select Workspaces (the icon looks similar to 🗇).
  4. Create a new workspace with a name of your choice, selecting a licensing mode in the Advanced section that includes Fabric capacity (Trial, Premium, or Fabric).

  5. When your new workspace opens, it should be empty.

    Screenshot of an empty workspace in Power BI.

Create a lakehouse

Now that you have a workspace, it’s time to create a data lakehouse for your data files.

  1. In the home page for the workspace, create a new Lakehouse with a name of your choice.

    After a minute or so, a new lakehouse will be created:

    Screenshot of a new lakehouse.

  2. View the new lakehouse, and note that the Lakehouse explorer pane on the left enables you to browse tables and files in the lakehouse:

    • The Tables folder contains tables that you can query using SQL. Tables in a Microsoft Fabric lakehouse are based on the open source Delta Lake file format, commonly used in Apache Spark.
    • The Files folder contains data files in the OneLake storage for the lakehouse that aren’t associated with managed delta tables. You can also create shortcuts in this folder to reference data that is stored externally.

    Currently, there are no tables or files in the lakehouse.

Ingest data

A simple way to ingest data is to use a Copy Data activity in a pipeline to extract the data from a source and copy it to a file in the lakehouse.

  1. On the Home page for your lakehouse, in the Get data menu, select New data pipeline, and create a new data pipeline named Ingest Data.

  2. In the Copy Data wizard, on the Choose a data source page, select Sample data and then select the NYC Taxi - Green sample dataset.

    Screenshot of the Choose data source page.

  3. On the Connect to data source page, view the tables in the data source. There should be one table that contains details of taxi trips in New York City. Then select Next to progress to the Choose data destination page.
  4. On the Choose data destination page, select your existing lakehouse. Then select Next.
  5. Set the following data destination options, and then select Next:
    • Root folder: Tables
    • Load settings: Load to new table
    • Destination table name: taxi_rides (You may need to wait for the column mappings preview to be displayed before you can change this)
    • Column mappings: Leave the default mappings as-is
    • Enable partition: Unselected

  6. On the Review + save page, ensure that the Start data transfer immediately option is selected, and then select Save + Run.

    A new pipeline containing a Copy Data activity is created, as shown here:

    Screenshot of a pipeline with a Copy Data activity.

    When the pipeline starts to run, you can monitor its status in the Output pane under the pipeline designer. Use the ↻ (Refresh) icon to refresh the status, and wait until it has succeeeded (which may take 10 minutes or more).

  7. In the hub menu bar on the left, select your lakehouse.

  8. On the Home page, in the Lakehouse explorer pane, in the … menu for the Tables node, select Refresh and then expand Tables to verify that the taxi_rides table has been created.

    Note: If the new table is listed as unidentified, use its Refresh menu option to refresh the view.

  9. Select the taxi_rides table to view its contents.

    Screenshot of the taxi_rides table.

Query data in a lakehouse

Now that you have ingested data into a table in the lakehouse, you can use SQL to query it.

  1. At the top right of the Lakehouse page, switch from Lakehouse view to the SQL analytics endpoint for your lakehouse.

  2. In the toolbar, select New SQL query. Then enter the following SQL code into the query editor:

     SELECT  DATENAME(dw,lpepPickupDatetime) AS Day,
         AVG(tripDistance) As AvgDistance
 FROM taxi_rides
 GROUP BY DATENAME(dw,lpepPickupDatetime)

  3. Select the ▷ Run button to run the query and review the results, which should include the average trip distance for each day of the week.

    Screenshot of a SQL query.

Visualize data in a lakehouse

Microsoft Fabric lakehouses organize all tables in a semantic data model, which you can use to create visualizations and reports.

  1. At the bottom left of the page, under the Explorer pane, select the Model tab to see the data model for the tables in the lakehouse (this includes system tables as well as the taxi_rides table).
  2. In the toolbar, select New report to create a new report based on the taxi_rides.
  3. In the report designer:
    1. In the Data pane, expand the taxi_rides table and select the lpepPickupDatetime and passengerCount fields.

    2. In the Visualizations pane, select the Line chart visualization. Then ensure that the X-axis contains the lpepPickupDatetime field and the Y axis contains Sum of passengerCount.

      Screenshot of a Power BI report.

    Tip: You can use the » icons to hide the report designer panes in order to see the report more clearly.

  4. On the File menu, select Save to save the report as Taxi Rides Report in your Fabric workspace.

    You can find the report in the page for your workspace in the Microsoft Fabric portal.

Clean up resources

If you’ve finished exploring Microsoft Fabric, you can delete the workspace you created for this exercise.

  1. In the bar on the left, select the icon for your workspace to view all of the items it contains.
  2. In the … menu on the toolbar, select Workspace settings.
  3. In the Other section, select Remove this workspace.