Plainsight
TechnologyMicrosoft Fabric

Fast track to Microsoft Fabric.

Capacity sizing, lakehouse architecture, pipeline patterns, naming conventions. The decisions that determine whether Fabric pays back its bill, made once across dozens of rollouts so you don't make them again. Plus a free accelerator that turns eight questions into Terraform, CI/CD, and a compliance doc.

Sound familiar?

The things we hear from teams already running, or considering, Fabric.

From our playbook

The opinions, written down.

Six of the patterns we apply on every Fabric rollout. Written down so you can read them before talking to us.

Capacity

Multiple small capacities, not one big one.

Strict workload isolation for compliance and billing. Avoids noisy-neighbour performance issues between heavy ETL and interactive users. Pairs with Autoscale Billing for Spark on F-SKUs, billed separately from the base capacity.

Lakehouse

Bronze, Silver, Gold. Delta-first, everywhere.

Medallion architecture mapped to Landing/Staging, ADS, and Gold business products. Delta for all transactional tables. Parquet only where archival doesn't need ACID. OneLake shortcuts to share curated tables across lakehouses without copying.

Sizing

F2 is a POC capacity. Not a production one.

F4-F8 for dev. F16-F32 for small to medium prod. F64 for enterprise. Sized for peak concurrency and 6-12 month growth, not for average load. Avoid mixing heavy ETL and interactive queries on the same capacity.

Pipelines

Incremental and idempotent. MERGE, never INSERT.

MERGE upserts over blind inserts. Save watermarks before state changes, not after. Deterministic keys so replays are safe. Retries with exponential backoff, circuit breakers for dependent jobs, structured logging at every step.

Naming

Environment-agnostic names, prefixed by type and purpose.

Workspace folders don't survive Git promotion. Naming does. We standardise on patterns like LH_STORE_Sales_Silver and DP_ORCHS_NightlyETL. Environment lives in the workspace scope and deployment pipeline, never in the artifact name.

Tooling

Right tool per task. Standard tooling across teams.

VS Code as the primary dev environment with Fabric extensions. OneLake Explorer for file-level operations and offline sync. SSMS for SQL deep-dives. Power BI Desktop with PBIP files for version-controlled semantic models.

Read the full Fabric playbook

How we deliver a Fabric setup

Four steps. The same every time. The decisions inside each one come from doing it dozens of times, not from reading a docs page.

1

Anchor

One real workload, one person who cares about the answer. Not a tenant-wide migration plan. The thing we ship in the first iteration must be useful on its own.

2

Right-size

We measure actual data volume, query patterns, and refresh cadence before we size capacity. A wrong F-SKU is the most expensive Fabric mistake we see.

3

Build end-to-end

Source to OneLake to semantic model to Power BI. Medallion structure, MERGE-based pipelines, standardised naming, separated capacities for ETL vs interactive. The patterns we apply on every rollout.

4

Hand it over

Domain structure, admin runbooks, capacity monitoring, documentation. Your team runs it without us, and the next workload reuses what's already built.

Free accelerator

Get a Fabric rollout plan in 5 minutes.

We turned our rollout patterns into a tool. Answer eight questions, get Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, a compliance justification doc, and an interactive rollout explorer back. Use it as a starting point, or hand it to us to deliver.

  • Terraform HCL for your Azure tenant and Fabric setup
  • CI/CD pipelines for promoting changes through environments
  • Compliance doc mapping every decision to your frameworks
  • 20+ frameworks supported: GDPR, DORA, NIS2, ISO 27001, EU AI Act, more
AI accelerator

Already on SSIS, ADF, or Synapse? Move it to Fabric.

Our AI-driven migration framework scans your estate, designs the Fabric target mapped to medallion layers, and generates deployable pipelines, SQL, and notebooks. AI-assisted, never autonomous: our engineers sign off at every gate.

  • Automated estate discovery in minutes, with a complexity scorecard
  • Target design spec mapped to your medallion architecture
  • Deployable Fabric assets: pipelines, SQL scripts, and notebooks
  • Validation report, ready for business sign-off

Fabric work sits inside Analytics, part of Build.

Strategy decides if Fabric is the right pick. We build it. Experts keep it running once we hand it over.

Direction

Strategy

From business questions to a data, AI and software direction your organisation can follow.

Explore →
Value

Build

Data and analytics, AI, and custom software. Built with adoption and ownership from day one.

Explore →
Continuity

Experts

Specialists who think like teammates. Keep your engine running and your team growing.

Explore →

Thinking about Fabric? Talk to us first.

Half-hour call. We'll tell you if it's the right pick for your situation, and what it actually takes to get one workload running well.

Book a Fabric chat