4 min read

Real-time data warehousing with Microsoft Dataverse and Fabric zero-copy integration

By Milinda Vitharana

March 31, 2025

Content type
Events

For too long, organizations have struggled to unlock the full potential of their data. Obtaining relevant insights required building complex data pipelines, managing expensive infrastructure, and waiting for stale reports with limited value. The promise of AI agents that act in the moment, on real-time data has been real but out of reach for many due to cost, complexity, and technical overhead.

That changes now.

Dataverse—the secure, scalable business apps and data platform behind Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Apps, and Dynamics 365—is now natively integrated with Microsoft Fabric, the industry-leading big data and analytics platform. This seamless, zero-copy, real-time integration allows organizations to combine operational and analytical data instantly, without replication or ETL. As your data gets updated in Dataverse, data professionals see latest data continuously updated in Fabric. No need to build and manage complex data integrations.

Fabric + Dataverse Better Together

Copilots in Fabric can create rich reports, discover hidden trends, or re-shape data for even more insights – your employees get to harness the power of data, without requiring the organization to seek expert assistance.

Organizations can act on these insights immediately by building Power Apps, automating workflows in Power Automate, or creating real-time Fabric data agents to drive decisions and actions across the business. It’s a direct path to operational intelligence.

There’s no need to invest in third-party connectors, spin up big-budget integration projects, or provision heavy infrastructure, no need for ongoing monitoring and maintenance. Organizations can get started with a fully functional trial, pay only for the data they use, and scale as they grow. Most organizations find this approach to be significantly more cost-effective than exporting data and building data warehouses with data pipelines.

Announcing enhancements to Link to Fabric and Mirrored Dataverse

The feature at the center of this transformation is Link to Fabric in the Power Apps maker portal, which enables real-time connectivity between Dataverse, Power Platform, and Microsoft Fabric without data movement.

Since launching Link to Fabric in general availability in November 2023, thousands of organizations have adopted the Link to Fabric feature—and it just keeps getting better. Thanks to enhancements in Microsoft’s managed compute infrastructure, we are announcing faster data refreshes for updates in Dataverse in Fabric within a few minutes, delivering near real-time operational insights without impacting critical transactional real-time workloads. This capability will rollout to existing customers in the coming weeks. Businesses eager to participate in the early adoption of this cutting-edge technology can join the forum at aka.ms/FabricLinkforDynamics.

We are also excited to announce Mirrored Dataverse in private preview, a native experience in Fabric which enables data professionals to securely activate Link to Fabric feature in Dataverse from any Fabric workspace, and to combine all their business data with analytical data in Microsoft OneLake. Register for preview at https://aka.ms/MirroredDataverse.

Using OneLake as a unified data foundation, an organization can:

Mirror Dataverse into Fabric for secure, instant access—no ETL or replication required
Use shortcuts to automate data assimilation from other clouds, such as Amazon and Google, without physically moving it
Transform data its own way using low-code tools like Dataflows or advanced capabilities like Spark notebooks and Data Factory
Bring SQL skills along for the ride. Fabric speaks T-SQL, so existing scripts and stored procedures are fully supported.

With Dataverse and Fabric working seamlessly together, business and analytical data are unified, updated in real-time, and available for insights at all times.

Unlock real time insights and actions with Fabric data agents

While real-time operational dashboards are an important first step, organizations can also harness the power of AI driven data agents to achieve real-time insights and action. Data professionals in Fabric can leverage real-time data integrations and create Fabric data agents (previously known as Fabric AI Skills). These agents act like an AI-powered data analyst—deeply familiar with your unique business data and ready to reason, answer questions, surface insights, or run exploratory research on your behalf.

There’s no need to source, train, or manage models – just select the data (live from Dataverse via Link to Fabric or any connected source) and the agent is ready. It’s a faster track to building intelligence into operations without requiring advanced AI expertise.

And just like the rest of the Fabric and Dataverse integration, it’s designed for speed, simplicity, and scale. Organizations can launch a fully functional trial in hours, with no upfront cost, and pay only for the data they use. This fully managed experience means no complex configurations and no disruption to existing workloads. In fact, most customers report a modest 10% increase in all-up data size managed after enabling the feature in production—delivering powerful AI capabilities at a fraction of the cost of traditional real-time data warehouse solutions.

Using Link to Fabric feature in Dataverse and Fabric Data warehouse, we simplified setup and configuration process, eliminating the need for multiple tools and streamlined data integration, making it easier to monitor and troubleshoot issues.

The transition also removed several data copy steps enhancing efficiency and reducing processing times from 30-40 minutes to 2-3 minutes. This means, our business gets critical data and reports much sooner, and the reports and tasks run much faster. By consolidating all our services into Fabric, we reduced the costs of our data warehouse by over 50% each month.

Lekha Kannoju, Sr. Manager of Business Intelligence, Global IT | CRC Industries, Inc.

Take action

With business and analytical data now unified in real time, it’s easier than ever to turn insights into impact. Build responsive Power Apps, automate business processes, and empower teams to act confidently—using the freshest data from across your organization via Fabric OneLake.

Get started today

Whether you’re a data professional, a low-code maker, or just curious about what’s possible—there’s never been a better time to explore real-time intelligence with Dataverse and Fabric.

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