Semarchy’s latest push to embed mastered, governed data into Microsoft’s Fabric stack signals a pragmatic next step in the race to make enterprise data both AI-ready and business-ready — bringing golden records, semantic models, and DataOps workflows directly into OneLake so Power BI, GitHub Copilot, and other Fabric-native tools can consume trusted data at scale.
Semarchy is a long-standing player in master data management (MDM) and unified data platforms; over the past several years the company has deepened ties to Microsoft’s data ecosystem, extending integration with Microsoft Purview and now moving to a tighter interoperability with Microsoft Fabric and OneLake. Semarchy describes the integration as a way to publish mastered data products — datasets, APIs, metadata, and semantic models — so they are natively available to Fabric workloads and discoverable through Purview. Semarchy’s public materials and partner pages frame this as a DataOps-friendly approach to get certified “golden records” into the systems analysts and AI tools already use. (semarchy.com)
Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Fabric platform continues to evolve around OneLake (Fabric’s unified data lake) and the concept of semantic models — enterprise-friendly, reusable business models that sit over raw tables and represent metrics, hierarchies, and business terminology for analytics and AI consumption. Fabric has invested heavily in making semantic models exportable to Delta tables in OneLake and accessible across Fabric workloads like Power BI, Data Engineering, and the Fabric Data Warehouse. These capabilities are part of Microsoft’s deliberate effort to let the same canonical model back both human reports and programmatic AI workloads. (learn.microsoft.com)
FabCon — Microsoft’s Fabric community conference — has become the staging ground for many of these vendor integrations and product previews; the European FabCon Vienna schedule and Fabric community updates have highlighted OneLake, semantic models, and Copilot experiences as core themes for 2025. Semarchy’s announcement positions the integration as being demonstrated at FabCon Europe in Vienna as part of that industry rollout. (sharepointeurope.com)
However, the integration is not a silver bullet. Successful adoption will depend on careful orchestration of sync semantics, enforcement of security and access control across layers, and disciplined governance practices that keep the “single source of truth” actually synchronized and trusted by end users. Organizations evaluating this approach should insist on a hands-on pilot that proves both technical feasibility and measurable business outcomes before broad rollout.
For organizations with an existing Microsoft Fabric investment and a need to operationalize trusted master records for analytics and AI, Semarchy’s Fabric integration is a compelling option — provided teams validate refresh guarantees, governance enforcement, and the operational model in their own environment before making long-term commitments. (learn.microsoft.com)
Semarchy’s move highlights a central truth about modern analytics: governance and agility must coexist. The companies that get both right — marrying certified golden records with developer-friendly DataOps and Fabric’s semantic surface area — will have a decisive advantage in delivering reliable analytics and trustworthy AI at enterprise scale.
Source: Business Wire https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250915943713/en/Semarchy-Announces-Microsoft-Fabric-Integration-to-Power-Trusted-Data-Insights-in-Microsoft-Power-BI-and-GitHub-Copilot/
Background
Semarchy is a long-standing player in master data management (MDM) and unified data platforms; over the past several years the company has deepened ties to Microsoft’s data ecosystem, extending integration with Microsoft Purview and now moving to a tighter interoperability with Microsoft Fabric and OneLake. Semarchy describes the integration as a way to publish mastered data products — datasets, APIs, metadata, and semantic models — so they are natively available to Fabric workloads and discoverable through Purview. Semarchy’s public materials and partner pages frame this as a DataOps-friendly approach to get certified “golden records” into the systems analysts and AI tools already use. (semarchy.com)Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Fabric platform continues to evolve around OneLake (Fabric’s unified data lake) and the concept of semantic models — enterprise-friendly, reusable business models that sit over raw tables and represent metrics, hierarchies, and business terminology for analytics and AI consumption. Fabric has invested heavily in making semantic models exportable to Delta tables in OneLake and accessible across Fabric workloads like Power BI, Data Engineering, and the Fabric Data Warehouse. These capabilities are part of Microsoft’s deliberate effort to let the same canonical model back both human reports and programmatic AI workloads. (learn.microsoft.com)
FabCon — Microsoft’s Fabric community conference — has become the staging ground for many of these vendor integrations and product previews; the European FabCon Vienna schedule and Fabric community updates have highlighted OneLake, semantic models, and Copilot experiences as core themes for 2025. Semarchy’s announcement positions the integration as being demonstrated at FabCon Europe in Vienna as part of that industry rollout. (sharepointeurope.com)
What Semarchy’s Fabric integration actually does
Core capabilities
- Semarchy can publish mastered data products (golden records, domain models, enriched datasets) so they are directly accessible from Microsoft Fabric workspaces and OneLake.
- The integration maps Semarchy metadata into Microsoft Purview, making lineage, certification status, and business context discoverable by Fabric users.
- Semarchy exposes enriched data and semantic models for consumption by Power BI reports, Fabric Data Warehouse workloads, Data Engineering processes, and real-time intelligence features, enabling a single source of truth for analytics and AI.
- DataOps workflows are enabled through familiar developer tooling: Visual Studio Code, Git integration, GitHub (including GitHub Copilot), and CI/CD practices so teams can produce, version, and publish data products rapidly.
How this fits into Fabric’s architecture
At a technical level, the integration leverages two Fabric design patterns:- Export or mirror the semantic model’s import tables into Delta tables in OneLake so other compute engines (Spark, SQL analytics, Data Warehouse) and services (Power BI) can read them directly.
- Surface associated metadata (entity definitions, lineage, certification status) into Purview so governance and discovery stay linked to the mastered artifacts.
Why this matters: business and technical upside
1) Shorter path from trusted data to insights
Business users and analysts frequently distrust ad-hoc datasets. When MDM systems certify a single canonical view of business entities (customers, products, suppliers) and those certified records are made directly available in OneLake, the chain from transaction systems to dashboard shrinks. Reports built on top of a Semarchy-published semantic model carry the context and stewardship metadata that analysts need to trust metrics.2) Better outcomes for AI and Copilot experiences
Copilot-style assistants and large language models are highly sensitive to the quality and context of the data they query. If Copilot or Fabric’s AI features retrieve enriched, semantically labeled, and governed golden records (rather than raw, inconsistent tables), outputs — from narrative summaries to generated SQL — will be more accurate and less likely to propagate bad assumptions. Microsoft’s work to bring Copilot into Power BI and Fabric makes this integration timely: giving AI agents a single source of authorized, curated context materially reduces hallucination risk and accelerates answer fidelity. (microsoft.com)3) DataOps at scale
Semarchy’s emphasis on Git-based workflows, Visual Studio Code, and GitHub Copilot integration means data teams can manage data products with the same discipline used for application code. Version control, PRs, code reviews, and automated publishing reduce friction between data stewardship and analytics delivery. For companies that have struggled with fragmented pipelines, the combination of MDM governance plus GitOps practices in Fabric is a clear productivity lever. (semarchy.com)Technical deep dive: semantic models, Delta tables and OneLake
Semantic models vs. raw tables
Semantic models in Fabric are not just datasets; they embody business logic (measures, hierarchies, display names) and usage constraints (RLS, OLS). Microsoft’s OneLake integration allows semantic models in import mode to export their import tables into Delta format within OneLake; those Delta tables become first-class artifacts consumable by Spark, SQL, and other Fabric engines. In practice, this means a single semantic model can be published and then accessed either as a semantic layer (for Power BI) or as Delta tables (for programmatic workloads). (learn.microsoft.com)Lineage and governance in Purview
A critical piece of enterprise adoption is governance: who certified the record, when, and what transformations were applied. Semarchy’s integration claims to push key stewardship metadata into Microsoft Purview so data stewards and analysts can find mastered entities, inspect lineage, and see certification badges before using data in analysis. This closes a major governance loop that typically lives outside analytics tooling. Semarchy’s prior Purview integration work underpins this capability and makes the metadata sharing credible. (semarchy.com)Where Semarchy + Fabric will help first (use cases)
- Customer 360: Publish canonical customer records into OneLake and overlay behavioral/transactional feeds with the same semantic model for consistent reporting and AI-driven personalization.
- Product data management: Master product hierarchies and attributes in Semarchy, expose them to Fabric for pricing analytics, inventory forecasting, and generative product descriptions by Copilot.
- Compliance reporting: Use Purview-discoverable certifications and lineage to reduce audit cycles and demonstrate governed metrics in regulatory reporting.
- Real-time analytics: Pair Semarchy’s gold records with Fabric’s Real-Time Intelligence to power operational dashboards that combine streaming events with certified master data.
Strengths and notable positives
- End-to-end alignment: Linking MDM, semantic models, OneLake Delta artifacts, and Purview closes the loop between governance and analytics — a practical requirement for enterprise-scale BI and GenAI.
- Developer-friendly DataOps: Semarchy’s emphasis on Git, VS Code, and Copilot integration lowers friction for engineering teams and institutionalizes reproducible data product delivery.
- Interoperability with Fabric features: Because Fabric already supports semantic model exports to OneLake and cross-workload consumption, Semarchy’s approach fits into Microsoft’s recommended architecture rather than trying to bolt in an external pattern. (learn.microsoft.com)
- Marketplace availability: Semarchy’s platform has previously been listed in cloud marketplaces, simplifying procurement and deployment for Azure-centric shops, which reduces procurement friction. (semarchy.com)
Risks, limitations, and unanswered questions
1) Operational complexity and sync semantics
Exporting semantic models to Delta tables is powerful, but it introduces synchronization semantics that teams must manage. Exported Delta tables may have refresh cadence, retention windows for older versions, and transformation limits (for example, measures and certain calculated items won’t translate to raw Delta tables). Teams must plan refresh and consistency guarantees between the Semarchy-managed source of truth and the exported artifacts. Microsoft’s OneLake export tooling includes specific limitations and refresh behavior that architects must understand. (learn.microsoft.com)2) Access controls and security model alignment
OneLake and Fabric have evolving permission models (workspace roles, capacity-level settings, row/column security). Enterprises must ensure Semarchy’s governance semantics (certification, steward assignment) are synchronized with OneLake security policies and Purview access controls, otherwise trust signals in Purview could outpace runtime enforcement in Fabric workloads.3) Vendor lock-in and semantic model portability
Exposing semantic models as first-class entities inside OneLake is attractive, but organizations should evaluate portability: how tied are those semantic models to Fabric’s export formats, and what is the migration path if a customer needs to move to a different lake or analytics stack? Semantic model formats, XMLA behaviors, and delta table conventions differ across platforms; architects should require exportability and clear fallbacks.4) Claim verification and demonstration footprint
Semarchy’s announcement positions a demo at FabCon Europe in Vienna and describes “first of several integrations.” while public Semarchy materials confirm the strategic partnership and prior Purview integration, independent proof of specific FabCon sessions or hands-on availability of the feature in a general-availability form is limited in public documentation at this moment. Organizations should treat the integration as a supported preview/partner capability until they validate GA status and SLAs with Semarchy and Microsoft. (semarchy.com)Implementation checklist for architects and data leaders
- Inventory current master data sources and stewarding processes; identify candidate domains (customer, product, supplier) where a canonical record will materially improve reporting.
- Validate Fabric capacity and Power BI SKU prerequisites: OneLake integration for semantic models and Direct Lake features may require specific Fabric/Power BI SKUs and workspace settings.
- Prototype a single domain: publish Semarchy’s mastered dataset to OneLake, export the semantic model to Delta, and build a Power BI report and a Copilot prompt flow that references the exported artifact.
- Configure Purview synchronization: ensure Semarchy’s metadata flows into Purview and that lineage and certification are visible to data consumers.
- Automate DataOps: set up Git integration, CI/CD pipelines, and guardrails for semantic model edits, and implement role-based approvals for publishing changes.
- Validate security posture: test row/column security propagation, and ensure that OneLake permission enforcement matches governance expectations.
- Measure and iterate: instrument query performance, refresh latencies, and Copilot accuracy metrics to quantify the uplift from moving to mastered, semantically surfaced data.
Competitive context and what vendors are doing
Semarchy is not alone in pushing MDM into Fabric. Other enterprise data-management vendors (including large incumbents) have announced Fabric integrations or native Fabric apps that bring data quality, lineage, and MDM-like features into OneLake and Fabric’s workloads. Informatica, for example, publicized MDM and data-quality extensions into Fabric earlier in 2025. This broader vendor movement validates Microsoft’s strategy: Fabric is rapidly becoming the converged place where governance, engineering, analytics, and AI meet. For buyers, the choice now hinges on integration depth, operational model, and whether the vendor’s approach is native (in-lake) or adjacent (external service that pushes artifacts). (informatica.com)Recommendations for enterprises evaluating the Semarchy-Fabric route
- Treat the Semarchy-Fabric integration as a strategic enabler for trusted analytics and AI, but require a proof-of-concept that demonstrates end-to-end DataOps, governance, and runtime enforcement.
- Prioritize domains where the value of a canonical record is measurable (e.g., revenue, regulatory reporting, customer acquisition cost) and pilot with a two-quarter roadmap.
- Validate operational contracts: refresh windows, retention of older Delta versions, and expected latency between Semarchy changes and Fabric consumers.
- Confirm Purview sync semantics and whether key stewardship metadata (certifications, steward owners, SLA attributes) is searchable and actionable for downstream users.
- Get legal and procurement teams to align on marketplace licensing vs. managed service SLAs if you plan to deploy via Azure Marketplace.
Final assessment
Semarchy’s announcement is a pragmatic, well-timed extension of the long-standing trend to bring data governance and MDM closer to analytics and AI runtimes. By focusing on OneLake and Fabric semantic models, the integration promises to reduce friction between master-data certification and day-to-day analytics consumption, while enabling DataOps practices that many organizations are still struggling to adopt.However, the integration is not a silver bullet. Successful adoption will depend on careful orchestration of sync semantics, enforcement of security and access control across layers, and disciplined governance practices that keep the “single source of truth” actually synchronized and trusted by end users. Organizations evaluating this approach should insist on a hands-on pilot that proves both technical feasibility and measurable business outcomes before broad rollout.
For organizations with an existing Microsoft Fabric investment and a need to operationalize trusted master records for analytics and AI, Semarchy’s Fabric integration is a compelling option — provided teams validate refresh guarantees, governance enforcement, and the operational model in their own environment before making long-term commitments. (learn.microsoft.com)
Semarchy’s move highlights a central truth about modern analytics: governance and agility must coexist. The companies that get both right — marrying certified golden records with developer-friendly DataOps and Fabric’s semantic surface area — will have a decisive advantage in delivering reliable analytics and trustworthy AI at enterprise scale.
Source: Business Wire https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250915943713/en/Semarchy-Announces-Microsoft-Fabric-Integration-to-Power-Trusted-Data-Insights-in-Microsoft-Power-BI-and-GitHub-Copilot/