Microsoft opens Fabric app-building tools to millions of Power BI users

Microsoft is offering Power BI customers the app-building tools and database services of its Fabric analytics and engineering platform, targeting an audience an order of magnitude larger than Fabric's current base. Power BI has more than 425,000 customers worldwide, while Fabric counts 40,000.

What Power BI licences now include

Organizations that license Power BI Pro and Power BI Premium Per User will get Fabric Apps and Fabric Database capabilities, up to 1GB per app, including authentication and security, at no additional cost. Microsoft argues that apps built in Fabric can be ported to Power BI with little extra work or expense.

Arun Ulag, executive vice president at Microsoft, told The Register: "We have 40,000 Fabric customers today. Power BI is an order of magnitude larger, with 425,000 customers: organizations, not individuals. The usage of Power BI exceeds 35 million business users every month."

Rayfin and coding agents

The centerpiece is Rayfin, an open-source SDK that lets users build data applications which accept inputs, write back data, preserve shared state and support operational workflows. Each application gets a 1GB Fabric SQL database, authentication and security. As an app grows, users can expand its functionality and hand it off to developers and IT teams without rebuilding it.

Rayfin works with GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex or any coding agent: users instruct an agent to build an application and deploy it where they specify, inside a Fabric environment. The feature is scheduled to arrive in preview in the coming weeks. Ulag said the "distinctions between a dashboard and an app are disappearing."

Fabric's growing footprint

Microsoft announced Fabric in 2023 as an integrated analytics, data warehouse and data lake environment. It has since added data mirroring, which lets customers run analytics on data held in other systems without pushing SQL queries directly at them, and last year transactional databases including its document database Cosmos DB and the Fabric SQL relational system.

The vendor is now extending integration to other platforms, including Salesforce application and data systems. It is previewing bidirectional integration with Salesforce Data Cloud 360, making CRM data available across the Microsoft stack for analytics and AI, including as business context for Fabric data agents, without duplicating that data.