Redmond to millions of Power BI users: You’re Fabric app devs now

Software giant expands audience for agent coding of data apps by an order of magnitude

Microsoft is pushing its data analytics and engineering environment to a new set of commercial users that are an “order of magnitude” greater than its current base.

Power BI has become a popular biz intelligence system - with more than 425,000 customers worldwide - particularly among customers of the Microsoft Dynamics application portfolio.

Now, Microsoft execs are trying to exploit this penetration by offering Power BI customers high-end database services and app building tools available on its Fabric data analytics and engineering platform.

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Customers who license Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium Per User will get Fabric Apps and Fabric Database capabilities (up to 1GB per app), along with security, at no additional cost. Microsoft argues that the Apps customers are building in Fabric can be ported to Power BI without much additional work or cost.

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Arun Ulag, exec veep at Microsoft, told The Register: “We have 40,000 Fabric customers today. Power BI is an order of magnitude larger, with 425,000 customers: organizations, not individuals. The usage of Power BI exceeds 35 million business users every month,” he said.

Microsoft is now offering this user base the ability to build data analytics-style apps using Rayfin, an open source SDK. The company says Rafin will let users create their own data applications that accept inputs, write back data, preserve shared state, and support operational workflows across to Fabric. Each application gets a 1GB Fabric SQL database, authentication, and security. As an application grows, users can expand its functionality and hand it off to developers and IT teams without rebuilding it.

By bringing Fabric application development to Power BI, Microsoft is showing that the “distinctions between a dashboard and an app are disappearing,” Ulag said.

Rayfin is designed to work with GitHub Copilot; Claude Code or Codex; or any coding agent, letting users instruct a coding agent to build an application and deploy where they specify,  in a Fabric environment.The feature is scheduled to be available in preview in the coming weeks.

Fabric was anounced by Microsoft in 2023 as an integrated analytics, data warehouse and data lake environment. It has since added data mirroring to allow users to run analytics on data in other environments without pushing SQL queries directly to them. Last year, the vendor added transactional databases to the environment, including its document database Cosmos DB and Fabric SQL relational system.

Microsoft says it is now extending its integration with other platforms, including Salesforce application and data systems. It is previewing bidirectional integration with Salesforce Data Cloud 360, making data from the CRM vendor available across the Microsoft system for analytics and AI, including as business context for Fabric data agents, without duplicating that data. Salesforce also has its own data environment and agent-building platform.®