Microsoft Fabric Updates Blog

Announcing the Public Preview of Copilot for Data Warehouse in Microsoft Fabric

We are excited to announce the public preview release of Copilot for Data Warehouse in Microsoft Fabric, a groundbreaking AI assistant designed to transform your data warehousing tasks.

Data warehouse development can be daunting for SQL developers, especially under tight timelines where insights are needed “yesterday”.  Developers may spend hours writing code, building schemas, documentation, and ensuring the relevant data points and relationships are created to enable downstream analysis. Analysts may still struggle to understand, write efficient and accurate queries, and ultimately, easily answer business questions. This potential skill gap can create friction and might reduce use and effectiveness of the warehouse.

While Synapse Data Warehouse already offers no code and pro code experiences for any skill level developer, let’s explore how the introduction of Copilot can help developers of all skill levels be more efficient in each step of database development, and simultaneously empower analysts or the business to rapidly uncover insights.

Supercharging Productivity with Copilot for Data Warehouse

Copilot integrates seamlessly with your warehouse, leveraging generative AI to provide intelligent insights, streamline operations, and enhance productivity.

Database Development with Copilot as a Paired Programmer

Copilot for Data Warehouse is designed to accelerate warehouse development by simplifying and automating key aspects of data management. Copilot helps you prepare, organize, model, secure, and query your data with ease and confidence. Copilot for Data Warehouse is the ultimate paired programmer, and productivity booster for any skill level developer – from data professionals to analysts.

Get Data Ready with Copilot Q&A

For SQL developers, getting data ready to analyze is the first step in developing a warehouse. Data may come from different sources, formats, and quality levels, requiring a lot of preprocessing and cleaning before it can be analyzed. Warehouses in Fabric support multiple ways to get data into the warehouse – pro-code, no-code, and T-SQL. Through the Copilot chat pane, you can ask natural language questions about these options – including questions about how to filter, transform, join data, and get guidance on best practices.

Accelerate Code Development with AI powered Code-Completions

Developing SQL can be time-consuming and prone to errors, especially for complex queries. Copilot enhances your coding efficiency by providing real-time, context-aware code completions directly in the SQL query editor as you type. This feature not only speeds up the query-writing process but also helps prevent common syntax errors, ensuring queries are accurate and optimized. Quicker query development allows more time for exploratory analysis, finding of new patterns, and testing of hypotheses.

You can also leave natural language comments directly in the query editor to generate SQL code:

Fine Tune and Optimize Query Development with Copilot Quick Actions

With AI-powered quick actions – available in the ribbon – understanding and correcting SQL queries becomes a breeze. The Explain quick action provides summarizations and easy-to-understand comments on any selected SQL, while the Fix quick action automatically corrects errors in your queries. These tools are invaluable for both novice and experienced users, helping to demystify SQL and improve code quality throughout your organization.

Fixing T-SQL code is as easy as clicking one button too:

Best Practice Development and Delivering Complex Scenario Guidance

Copilot for Data Warehouse ensures that you are equipped to navigate through complex scenarios and develop databases with best practices in mind. Whether you need to design a data warehouse from scratch, migrate data from legacy systems, or optimize your existing data structures, Copilot can help you by:

  • Answering your questions about the concepts and principles of database development, such as data modeling, data quality, data security, etc.
  • Providing pointers to relevant documentation and resources that explain how to apply database development techniques across different scenarios and industries.

Ensure Relevant Insights can be Discovered from the Warehouse

Leverage Copilot to help brainstorm different data points and trends that are personalized to your warehouse’s schema and metadata. Then, review the results, and iterate with Copilot to ensure that insights can be identified based on your requirements and business objectives. This provides a unique opportunity to ensure that the warehouse is user friendly and accessible, and a feedback loop to improve usability.

Copilot Empowers All-Skill Level Developers

We discussed how Copilot accelerates productivity for the developer, but what about analysts or business users? Accessing and querying data warehouses can be challenging for business users or analysts, who may lack the necessary SQL skills or domain knowledge to derive insights from the data in the warehouse. These difficulties can limit the ability to explore data and discover new insights that can drive business outcomes. Let’s dive in and see how Copilot can empower any skill-level developer to interact with the warehouse.

Discover Insights, Patterns, and Trends with Copilot

Sometimes, finding out what data to analyze can be the most challenging part of your T-SQL explorations. Use Copilot to help you brainstorm relevant trends or patterns to analyze within your data.

English as a Querying Language with Copilot

Quick and easy access to data insights is crucial for making informed decisions. Copilot accelerates this process by generating SQL queries from natural language prompts, providing decision-makers with timely and relevant data to support their strategies and actions. Not only does copilot generate SQL queries from natural language, but it also explains how it interprets the user’s intent and constructs a step-by-step plan above the query. Copilot also follows Microsoft’s responsible AI practices to ensure that the queries are ethical, fair, and transparent. This helps users understand Copilot operating guidelines and builds trust between the user and the system.

Democratizing Data with Copilot

By enabling users to interact with the data warehouse using natural language, Copilot democratizes access to data. This means even those without technical expertise can perform complex data analysis, fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making across the organization. Copilot helps you to leverage your data as a strategic asset and drive productivity across your organization.

Upskill Non-Technical Users to Develop SQL with Copilot

When everyone in an organization can access and analyze data, they can discover new insights and opportunities that would otherwise be missed. Copilot can help upskill non-technical users to write SQL in the warehouse:

  • Code completions can help users as they navigate to run queries and find the need to tweak them again.
  • Explain can help summarize and describe the intent of the SQL query
  • As queries are developed, fix can be used to develop error free queries, and help learn common syntactical issues

By using these features, users can gain confidence and competence in working with the data warehouse, without relying on technical experts or spending hours on online tutorials. Mix and match the plethora of Copilot capabilities as your organization begins to upskill and empower anyone to be a Fabric Warehouse developer.

Seamless Workflow Integration

The goodness of Microsoft Fabric’s suite of Copilots is tightly integrated into the warehouse in Fabric, seamlessly offering comprehensive support for the entire data management lifecycle.

End-To-End Data Management with Copilots in Fabric

In just one click from the warehouse, Copilots ensures that every stage of building an analytics solution – from data ingestion to reporting – is optimized for developer productivity:

  1. Copilot for Data Factory
    • Seamless Data Integration:  Automates and simplifies the process of data ingestion, transformation, and orchestration. Copilot for Data Factory helps you quickly connect to various data sources, clean and prepare data, and ensure your data warehouse is always up-to-date and accurate, all with intuitive, AI-driven guidance.
  2. Copilot for Data Science and Data Engineering
    • Advanced Data Processing: Shortcut to your warehouse tables and empower your data engineers to data engineers to build and manage data preparations, transformations, and models with greater efficiency. Copilot for Data Engineering provides context-aware code suggestions, natural language to code capabilities, and instant insights – enabling engineers to build advanced analytical workflows seamlessly with warehouse data.
  3. Copilot for Data Warehouse
    • Efficient Data Querying and Management: As discussed, Copilot for Data Warehouse revolutionizes how you interact with and manage your data warehouse, making data querying more accessible, accurate, and efficient.
  4. Copilot for Power BI
    • Enhanced Data Reporting and Visualization: Turn your warehouse data into actionable insights. Copilot for Power BI helps you create compelling reports and dashboards by suggesting relevant visualizations, assisting with DAX formulas, and providing narrative explanations of your data.

With the addition of Copilot for Data Warehouse, organizations can now achieve a seamless, end-to-end data management experience in Microsoft Fabric. From integrating and processing data to querying and visualizing it, each Copilot is designed to enhance productivity, reduce complexity, and ensure that users can focus on generating insights and driving business value. This holistic approach to data management allows you to maximize the value of your data warehouse, ensuring that every step from data ingestion to reporting is streamlined and optimized for performance.

Learn More and Next Steps

Copilot for Data Warehouse in Microsoft Fabric will revolutionize how organizations interact with their data. By simplifying complex tasks, providing intelligent insights, and accelerating productivity, Copilot empowers users at all levels of technical expertise to harness the full potential of their data warehouses. Use Copilot to enhance your data management and analysis, driving more efficient and insightful business outcomes.

To get started today, sign up here to enable Copilot for Data Warehouse in your organization! Additionally, visit our documentation and explore the capabilities of Copilot for Data Warehouse. Join us in this exciting journey to make data more accessible, understandable, and actionable for everyone in your organization.

Have any ideas or feedback to improve this experience? Post your thoughts to Ideas (microsoft.com). Thanks for reading!

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