Microsoft Power BI to Microsoft Fabric: Are You Ready for the Transition?

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In 2023, Microsoft announced its new platform, Microsoft Fabric—an innovative product that combined Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, Fabric SQL Databases, and Real-Time Intelligence into one platform.

Over 21,000 companies use Microsoft Fabric, and the success stories paint a promising future.

If your team still hasn’t switched to Fabric, now is just as good a time as any to do so, as the transition has huge potential upside.

John Sterrett from ProcureSQL attend the 2025 Microsoft Fabric Conference

John Sterrett, ProcureSQL CEO, is attending the 2025 Microsoft Fabric Conference Partner Only Event.

The first major benefit of the transition is a simplified work environment for all involved. Everything is integrated into one platform, eliminating headaches associated with handoffs and siloed workflow.

Data warehousing, data engineering, AI-powered analytics, data science, and business intelligence are now housed in one platform. A simpler platform means faster results for your company’s needs.

Moreover, as different teams work together, Fabric offers compliance features like data tracking, version control, and role-based access to allow multiple teams to work together simultaneously without compromising the integrity of your company’s data.

There is now an incredible amount of potential at their fingertips.

With Microsoft Fabric, forecasting future performance and AI-driven analysis now gives your teams a leg up on the competition.

This allows your business to move from a purely reactive business model to a proactive one where you can be one step ahead of what’s to come.

In terms of cost, you’ll be happy to know that even with all of these new additions, the pricing model for Fabric is scalable and flexible depending on how you use it.

Microsoft provides a Fabric Capacity Estimator, allowing you to take full advantage of the new platform by understanding the up-front cost.

If you have already been using products from Azure and Microsoft, switching to Fabric is a no-brainer.

Transitioning to Microsoft Fabric

One of Fabric’s most valuable and convenient aspects is that its data and analytics can be shared across all teams for all to examine, including with your business’s non-tech parts, which are the decision-makers and subject matter experts. The data is easily interpreted, so minimal training is needed even if your users are not tech-savvy.

On top of that, with the involvement of AI, the data allows you to see patterns ahead of time so that everyone is on board if any anomalies or spikes in activity come up.

Transitioning to a new platform can be incredibly challenging, but here at Procure SQL, we can help.

We’re ready to help your organization make this transition smoothly and with immediate impact. Whether you’re still on Microsoft Power BI or using a mix of analytics tools, our team can guide you through a phased implementation that minimizes disruption and maximizes value from day one.

Don’t wait to catch up — let ProcureSQL help you lead the way. Contact us today to get started on your Microsoft Fabric journey.

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Legacy Applications: Should They Stay Or Should They Go?

Modernizing Legacy Applications

Older legacy systems and legacy applications are crucial to a business’s functionality. They’re the backbone that holds a business together, whether they are a bank’s mainframe holding customer accounts, a factory’s SAP system handling inventory and payroll, or a retail company’s POS system for in-store sales.

As technology advances, these applications must be upgraded or replaced to keep up with the competition.

Legacy Applications Data things to know.

Legacy Applications Data: things to know.

Upgrading your legacy systems will make your company more efficient, threat-proof, and scalable. This results in a significant bump in cost savings from reduced hardware and maintenance expenses, plus a better user experience for both employees using the system and customers.

To upgrade, though, you need to make a big decision—do you migrate your entire system or upgrade/modernize the one you currently have?

Each has major pros and cons, and it’s key to understand both before you make your decision.

Legacy Application Migrations

First, let’s talk about migrating your legacy applications.

Migrating means moving your data to a new environment, such as a cloud platform or a new system. Having a data architect on hand for this engagement helps reduce risk and improves the rate of a successful migration.

The immediate benefit of doing this is getting a fresh start with all the benefits the new platform offers.

It’s a complete overhaul that will jumpstart your company and allow it to benefit from cutting-edge technology immediately.

Because it’s a complete overhaul, though, there can be some pitfalls that you must be aware of.

First and foremost, migrating your data and systems is a huge project. Old data often needs to be reformatted for new systems as it was written in old code or is for outdated relational databases. Your data migration could be done by refactoring or completely rewriting the data, which can take longer.

Add to this the investment in new software and training, and you have a more expensive, long-term project ahead of you.

Fortunately, the long-term benefits of migrating your system outweigh any cost you may have upfront.

The return on investment from a core business system migration has been shown to pay itself off quickly after adoption. For instance, organizations that migrated to Atlassian’s cloud technology reported an ROI of 155% over three years, and the initial payback period was reported as only six months.

Furthermore, with detailed planning, you can prevent any business disruption or data loss during migration.

To prevent business disruption, the new system should be rolled out slowly during non-peak hours to minimize disruption. Several layers of data backup and heightened security now exist to guarantee the safety of customer and company data. A data architect is crucial to execute your go-live and rollback scenarios smoothly.

Application Modernization for Legacy Applications

When it comes to modernization for legacy applications, you’ll have a quicker turnaround to upgrade your system without a complete overhaul and the full benefits of migration.

Think of migration as buying a new car, while modernization is tuning up your old one.

Because of the project’s smaller scale, modernization mitigates any setbacks that may accompany migration.

You’re keeping your old system, so you’ll save money on new software and training because it is familiar. Modernization focuses on small, gradual changes that allow you to keep your systems running while improvements are made.

The major drawback is that modernization has a smaller return on investment than migration. You won’t have access to all the benefits a totally new platform can offer.

In addition, as your system becomes increasingly outdated, you may eventually need to migrate to a new system. Modernization can delay this, but migration may one day become inevitable.

Making Your Decision Between the Two

Regardless of your choice in managing your legacy applications, data architects or database administrators should be part of your team to ensure your selection is executed correctly.

To make your decision between migration and modernization, see where you lie on the following two questions:

  1. What are your current needs? If your current system can’t keep up with your growth or eventually wants to scale, migration would be your way forward. Modernization is your choice if your current situation works but needs minor improvements.
  2. What’s your long-term plan and budget? Migration will require more upfront costs, but it has proven to return much more on its investment than modernization. Modernization is less cost-heavy upfront, can be implemented faster, and will deliver short-term improvements.

If you are unsure of any of these questions and need better insight into the best path forward, ProcureSQL can help. We are happy to chat with you one-on-one, or you can contact us today by clicking here to get started on your path to migration or modernization.

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The CIO’s Guide to Leveraging Microsoft Fabric for Competitive Advantage

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I attended the Microsoft Fabric conference for the first time last week. I wanted to provide a guide that CIOs and CEO’s could leverage to understand how they could utilize these new announcements at the 2025 Fabric Conference to obtain a competitive advantage.  To be transparent, I was skeptical because Microsoft consistently changes or rebrands its analytics platform every three to five years. We have gone from Parallel Data Warehouses (PDW) to Analytics Platform Services (APS), Azure Services, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and Azure Synapse Analytics, bringing us to Microsoft Fabric.

John Sterrett from ProcureSQL attend the 2025 Microsoft Fabric Conference

John Sterrett from ProcureSQL attends the 2025 Microsoft Fabric Conference.

To my surprise, after this conference, I have gone from seeing Fabric as Microsoft’s current take on Analytics to how it will stand out as an analytics platform of choice for people who want a simple, quick, and easy way to do analytics with the tools they already love using.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will only be as good as your data. Garbage in still equals garbage out, or as I like to call it, building a trusted dumpster fire. Preparing your data for AI will be the key to success with your AI Projects. Microsoft clearly understands this by focusing on preparing your data for AI with fabric mirroring, fabric databases, and SQL Server 2025. My takeaway is that you won’t have to get ready if you stay ready.

Copilot for all Fabric SKUs

Microsoft is committed to giving more people access to its AI tools as a commitment to this. In the coming weeks, users on F2 fabric compute and above can utilize Copilot. You can also use Fabric Copilot capacity, a new feature that simplifies setup, user management, and access to Copilot across different tiers.

Why Fabric Mirroring Is A Game Changer

Those following us aren’t new to the concept and advantages of fabric mirroring. One of the biggest mistakes we see that multiplies the odds of your analytics projects failing is incorrectly landing your data into your analytics platform of choice. Either the data is missing, transformed incorrectly, or stops coming in.

Microsoft provides what they call “mirroring” to help solve the problem of getting your data into your landing zone. With Azure SQL Databases and fabric databases, it’s as easy as a few clicks. Coming soon, you will have similar experiences with PostgreSQL in Azure, Oracle, SQL Server in VMs, and on-premises. What about other apps/data stores? Open mirroring is coming soon, and you can leverage it to get your other data into the Fabric landing zone.

Multi-Cloud Shortcuts

Microsoft has partnered with Snowflake to provide iceberg-formatted data across Fabric without any data movement or duplication. You can use a shortcut to point directly to an Iceberg table written using Snowflake in Azure. Snowflake has also added the ability to write Iceberg tables directly into OneLake.

Apache Iceberg tables can be used with Fabric due to a feature called metadata virtualization. Behind the scenes, this feature utilizes Apache XTable.

The key takeaway is that you can now have users use both Snowflake and Fabric to work on the same data, and it won’t involve data movement or duplication. Letting your data professionals utilize the tools they use best is a huge win.

Fabric Databases

Microsoft Fabric Databases is the new kid on the block, and it’s already seeing traction as the first fully SaaS-ifyed database offering. Fabric databases are built for ease of use as a unified data platform. You can create databases in a few clicks and have zero nobs to maintain as Microsoft fully manages the databases. Fabric database data is automatically mirrored into OneLake for analytics.

The key takeaway is that you can utilize Microsoft Fabric for application development and eliminate the need for a database infrastructure as a service MSP/partner. You can eliminate this cost as you should always get exponential value from your data MSP (what we built our practice focusing on), not just body for monitoring or keeping the lights up and running.

SQL Server 2025

Microsoft announced some updates to SQL Server 2025 at the keynote and in other breakout sessions. While it is still in private preview, it was easy to see how anyone who could write T-SQL could leverage models and vectors without knowing much about vectors or algorithms. GraphQL will allow developers to hit API endpoints to consume data like most other APIs. JSON will be treated as a 1st class citizen with its data type and indexes to help developers access their JSON data quickly and easily.

With SQL Server 2025, you can mirror your data to Microsoft Fabric with Zero ETL, zero code, our OneLake, and near real-time mirroring at no additional cost and without enabling change data capture. This combined will help reduce your total cost of ownership. There will be no more extra compute costs for Availability Groups; just continue to utilize your Fabric compute.

The key takeaway is that Microsoft continues investing in making SQL Server more accessible from the ground to the cloud. SQL Server will continue to make it easier to help you utilize your data inside and outside the relational platform.

Other notable features

Autoscale Billing for Spark—optimize Spark job costs by offloading your data’s extraction, load, and transformation to a serverless billing model.

Command-line interface—Fabric CLI is now in preview. Built on fabric APIs, it is designed for automation. There will be less clicky-clicky and more scripts that you can version control.

API and Terraform Integration—Automate key aspects of your fabric platform now by utilizing Terraform. If you have used it with Azure, get ready to use it with Fabric as well.

CI/CD enhancements—With Fabric’s git integration, multiple developers can frequently make incremental workspace updates. You could also utilize variable libraries and delivery pipelines to help get your changes vetted and tested quickly through your various testing environments.

User Data Functions—Fabric user data functions is a platform that allows you to host and run applications on Fabric. Data engineers can write custom business logic and embed it into the fabric ecosystem.

Statistics That Caught My Attention

  • Microsoft Fabric supports over 19,000 organizations, including 74% of Fortune 500 companies.
  • Power BI has over 275k users, including 95% of Fortune 500 companies
  • 45k consultants trained, 23k partner certifications in its first year
  • One billion new apps will be built in the next five years.
  • 87% of leaders believe AI will give their organization a competitive edge
  • 30,000+ fabric certifications completed in twelve months

I will be back next year and will provide you with another write-up like the one I produced this week, in case you cannot make it.

About ProcureSQL

ProcureSQL is the industry leader in providing data architecture as a service to enable companies to harness their data to grow their business. ProcureSQL is 100% onshore in the United States and supports the four quadrants of data, including application modernization, database management, data analytics, and data visualization. ProcureSQL works as a guide, mentor, leader, and implementer to provide innovative solutions to drive better business outcomes for all businesses. Click here to learn more about our service offerings.

Do you have questions about leveraging AI, Microsoft Fabric, or the Microsoft Data Platform? You can chat with me for free one-on-one or contact the team. We would love to share our knowledge and experience with you.

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