From the course: Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate (DP-600) Cert Prep by Microsoft Press

Introduction to data analysis and Microsoft Fabric - Microsoft Fabric Tutorial

From the course: Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate (DP-600) Cert Prep by Microsoft Press

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Introduction to data analysis and Microsoft Fabric

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- [Instructor] Before diving into what Microsoft Fabric is, let's understand the data analysis and the need of data analysis in today's world. Data analysis is essential for making informed decisions that are accurate and reliable. By analyzing the data, the organizations can identify patterns and trends, reducing the risk of improving decisions' qualities. This helps to ensure that the decisions are made on evidence rather than guessworks. Additionally, data analysis provides predictive and prescriptive analytics, allowing companies to forecast future trends and identify new opportunities. This helps in strategic planning and staying ahead of the competitors. Moreover, data analysis optimizes business process and enhances productivity. It identifies inefficiency, allowing for targeted improvements, better resource allocation, and continuous performance monitoring. In a nutshell, data analysis is crucial for smart decision-making, future planning, and efficient operation of an organization. Let's talk about some of the common challenges that were faced during data analysis. The first is the data quality. The moment we start working with the data, the data analysts spend a lot of their time and energy in understanding the data quality. They have to look for the quality, profile, and the statistical distribution of the columns to understand their data. The next challenge that is faced by the data analysts during data analysis is the data integration. Now that the organizations are not just focusing on the databases that we have in the organization, but in the current scenario, the organization is pulling in data from so many various platforms, like we have sensors and devices, we have social media platforms, we have databases which are storing the data, we have apps that are used to collect the data. Now, when the data is coming from so many different platforms, it is very important to talk about data integration before you actually start working with the data. Integration is one of the biggest challenges that were faced during the data analysis, as because each data source has a different level of granularity, integration was always a challenge. We had a lot of privacy concerns as well while we were in the data analysis process. When the data was handled by so many different users across the organization, we had data that could be relevant only for a specific team, for individual users, or anybody and everybody in the organization. The privacy could be set at an individual, team, or organization level. Maintaining different levels of privacy so that the sharing and collaboration become easy was a big challenge in the data analysis world. To cater to all these issues that were faced by data analysts normally, Microsoft came up with a very wonderful offering of Microsoft Fabric. Data analysis and Microsoft Fabric create a powerful collaboration to help us extract valuable insights from data. Fabric is a comprehensive analytics platform, marking the most significant advancement in data platforms since SQL. It provides us a unified platform that integrates with various data services tools, enabling seamless data ingestion, transformation, storage, and analysis.

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