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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.
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’s data and analytics tools. In November 2024, Microsoft Fabric expanded with support for the Azure SQL transactional database platform.
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’s CosmosDB. 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’s ChatGPT service. CosmosDB is also getting a boost via integration with Azure AI Foundry, giving more direct access for agentic AI to data.
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.
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.
“When I talk to customers, the message I consistently get is, please unify, I’m Chief Information Officer, I don’t want to be the Chief Integration Officer helping translate AI into my competitive advantage,” Arun Ulag, Corporate Vice President for Azure Data at Microsoft, told VentureBeat.
Fabric accelerates enterprise AI by eliminating data silos
Microsoft Fabric, the company’s unified data platform, continues its rapid growth trajectory by bringing previously separate products together in a cohesive ecosystem.
“We’re bringing all of our products together and unifying them into a single product, which is Microsoft Fabric,” Ulag said. “In some ways, you can think about Fabric as almost like what we did with Office 30 years ago.”
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.
“It’s growing very, very quickly,” he said.
CosmosDB in Fabric eliminates NoSQL infrastructure overhead
The headline addition to Fabric is CosmosDB, Microsoft’s NoSQL document database that powers many high-profile AI applications.
“CosmosDB is, by far, often becoming the database of choice for the world’s AI workloads,” Ulag said. “ChatGPT itself is built on CosmosDB… Walmart’s e-commerce store runs on CosmosDB as well.”
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.
Microsoft has taken very specific technical steps to maintain performance through an innovative caching system.
“Inside Fabric, we maintain a highly performant cache, which handles all the fast updates that CosmosDB does,” Ulag explained. “We have a very fast synchronization mechanism that is completely transparent to the customer, where the data is replicated in near real-time into OneLake.”
This approach delivers millisecond response times required for AI applications while eliminating infrastructure management tasks.
Why open source data formats are key to Fabric’s success
While Microsoft connects all its data products through the Fabric strategy, OneLake technology actually stores the data.
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’s a challenge that Microsoft is solving with an open source approach.
“Microsoft 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,” Ulag said.”It’s 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.”
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.
DiskANN open source release brings enterprise-grade vector search to all
Microsoft isn’t just using open source for data formats, it’s also contributing its own code too.
At Build, Microsoft is announcing that it is open sourcing the DiskANN vector search technology. Microsoft’s decision to open source DiskANN represents a significant contribution to the AI ecosystem, making enterprise-grade vector search capabilities available to all developers.
“We have a very, very strong vector capability called DiskANN, it was originally created in Microsoft Research, and it’s used in Bing… built into CosmosDB and built into Fabric,” said Ulag.
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.
“We’re allowing everybody to be able to get the benefits of the vector store that we’re using internally,” Ulag said.
Why it matters for enterprise data leaders
For enterprises leading in AI adoption, these announcements enable more sophisticated applications that seamlessly integrate multiple data types.
The complexity and the challenges of dealing with data silos aren’t 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.
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.
As enterprises increasingly compete on AI capabilities, Microsoft’s 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—potentially outpacing competitors still struggling with fragmented architectures.
