Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft is bringing even more database options into the Microsoft Fabric fold, alongside a series of initiatives that aim to help tackle enterprise data complexity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For literally generations of databases, compute and storage were always tightly coupled. That caused all kinds of scalability and data silo issues for enterprises. In 2023, Microsoft Fabric was first introduced as a strategy to help overcome that challenge. The basic idea behind Microsoft Fabric is to be a common data layer across Microsoft\u2019s data and analytics tools. In November 2024, Microsoft Fabric expanded with support for the Azure SQL transactional database platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft, just like its rivals at Google at Amazon, has a lot of different database platforms. While Azure SQL is widely used, when it comes to AI there is another more influential database platform and that\u2019s CosmosDB.\u00a0 At the Build 2025 conference today, Microsoft is announcing that CosmosDB is finally coming to Microsoft Fabric. CosmosDB is among the most critical databases in use today for AI as it is the database that is at the foundation for OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT service. CosmosDB is also getting a boost via integration with Azure AI Foundry, giving more direct access for agentic AI to data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are also a series of additional data updates including support for Microsoft Copilot in the PowerBI business intelligence platform. SQL Server 2025 database is being previewed and the DiskANN (Disk Approximate Nearest Neighbor) vector index is being open sourced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n These innovations directly address the integration complexity that plagues enterprise data teams when building AI applications. A key focus is to eliminate the data fragmentation that hampers enterprise AI initiatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen I talk to customers, the message I consistently get is, please unify,\u00a0 I\u2019m Chief Information Officer, I don\u2019t want to be the Chief Integration Officer helping translate AI into my competitive advantage,\u201d Arun Ulag, Corporate Vice President for Azure Data at Microsoft, told VentureBeat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft Fabric, the company\u2019s unified data platform, continues its rapid growth trajectory by bringing previously separate products together in a cohesive ecosystem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019re bringing all of our products together and unifying them into a single product, which is Microsoft Fabric,\u201d Ulag said. \u201cIn some ways, you can think about Fabric as almost like what we did with Office 30 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This strategy has clearly resonated with enterprises. Ulag said that Microsoft Fabric now has over 21,000 organizations as paying customers worldwide, including 70% of the Fortune 500.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s growing very, very quickly,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The headline addition to Fabric is CosmosDB, Microsoft\u2019s NoSQL document database that powers many high-profile AI applications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cCosmosDB is, by far, often becoming the database of choice for the world\u2019s AI workloads,\u201d Ulag said. \u201cChatGPT itself is built on CosmosDB\u2026 Walmart\u2019s e-commerce store runs on CosmosDB as well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n By bringing CosmosDB into Fabric, Microsoft enables organizations to deploy NoSQL databases without managing complex infrastructure. A key challenge of having a disaggregated compute and storage approach is maintaining performance without latency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft has taken very specific technical steps to maintain performance through an innovative caching system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cInside Fabric, we maintain a highly performant cache, which handles all the fast updates that CosmosDB does,\u201d Ulag explained. \u201cWe have a very fast synchronization mechanism that is completely transparent to the customer, where the data is replicated in near real-time into OneLake.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This approach delivers millisecond response times required for AI applications while eliminating infrastructure management tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Microsoft connects all its data products through the Fabric strategy, OneLake technology actually stores the data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is tremendous complexity in having a unified data lake that handles multiple different data types and formats from SQL, NoSQL and unstructured data. It\u2019s a challenge that Microsoft is solving with an open source approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMicrosoft has completely embraced open source data formats, so everything in Fabric, regardless of whether which workload it is, by default, is always in Apache Parquet and Delta Lake,\u201d Ulag said.\u201dIt\u2019s really a unified product, with the unified architecture and a unified business model, with all of the data sitting in a global SaaS data lake, which is OneLake in open source data formats.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n This optimization means all Fabric services, from SQL to Power BI to CosmosDB, can access the same underlying data without conversion or duplication, eliminating the traditional performance penalty associated with open formats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft isn\u2019t just using open source for data formats, it\u2019s also contributing its own code too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At Build, Microsoft is announcing that it is open sourcing the DiskANN vector search technology. Microsoft\u2019s decision to open source DiskANN represents a significant contribution to the AI ecosystem, making enterprise-grade vector search capabilities available to all developers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe have a very, very strong vector capability called DiskANN, it was originally created in Microsoft Research, and it\u2019s used in Bing\u2026 built into CosmosDB and built into Fabric,\u201d said Ulag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n DiskANN implements approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) search algorithms optimized for disk-based operations, making it ideal for large-scale vector databases that exceed memory limitations. By open sourcing DiskANN, Microsoft enables developers to implement the same high-performance vector search used by ChatGPT and other leading AI applications. This helps address one of the key challenges in building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, where finding semantically similar content quickly is essential for grounding AI responses in enterprise data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019re allowing everybody to be able to get the benefits of the vector store that we\u2019re using internally,\u201d Ulag said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For enterprises leading in AI adoption, these announcements enable more sophisticated applications that seamlessly integrate multiple data types.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The complexity and the challenges of dealing with data silos aren\u2019t just about different locations but different formats too. The continued evolution of Microsoft Fabric directly addresses that concern in a way that no other hyperscaler is doing today.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n The focus and commitment to open source standards at the core is also important for enterprises as it removes some lock-in risk that would be present if the data was stuck in proprietary formats.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As enterprises increasingly compete on AI capabilities, Microsoft\u2019s unified approach removes a significant barrier to innovation. Organizations that embrace this integration can shift their focus from maintaining complex data pipelines to creating AI applications that deliver tangible business value\u2014potentially outpacing competitors still struggling with fragmented architectures.<\/p>\n Daily insights on business use cases with VB Daily<\/strong><\/p>\n If you want to impress your boss, VB Daily has you covered. We give you the inside scoop on what companies are doing with generative AI, from regulatory shifts to practical deployments, so you can share insights for maximum ROI.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tThanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here.\n\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n An error occured.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n<\/div>Fabric accelerates enterprise AI by eliminating data silos<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
CosmosDB in Fabric eliminates NoSQL infrastructure overhead<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Why open source data formats are key to Fabric\u2019s success<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
DiskANN open source release brings enterprise-grade vector search to all<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Why it matters for enterprise data leaders<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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