Microsoft Fabric and Azure data platforms in Greystones: architecture, capacity and cost

The question we are asked most often by Greystones organisations is whether they need Microsoft Fabric. The answer is frequently no, and saying so has cost us work we did not want.

This page is about building a data platform for an organisation in Greystones, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse, Data Factory and the lakehouse patterns underneath them, with the local economy taken seriously. Greystones's base in software and technology, professional and legal services, and medical devices determines the data volumes, the latency requirements and the retention obligations, and those three things decide the architecture. The client population here is shaped by technology and professional services businesses serving Dublin and medical device operations in Wicklow.

Does a Greystones organisation actually need Fabric?

The case for Fabric gets strong when more than one of these holds: import models under strain, the same data needed through both SQL and notebooks, governed self-service for several teams, retention that a desktop model cannot carry, or a Premium capacity already on the bill. One analyst maintaining three import models that refresh in twenty minutes does not need a capacity, and buying one will not improve anything.

What the data actually looks like in Greystones

Software and technology

Product event streams at very high volume alongside subscription, billing and support data that must be joined at account grain to be useful. Source systems typically include billing and subscription platform, CRM, product event pipeline, support platform and finance system.

For a platform design, the consequence is specific. ARR comes from a finance spreadsheet with manual adjustments, so restating a prior period requires archaeology and diligence becomes painful. So the architecture has to make the raw grain replayable rather than aggregating at ingestion, and the first serving model should be an effective-dated contract and movement model so ARR is reproducible for any historical date, then product events joined at account grain.

Professional and legal services

Time, billing and pipeline data where almost every meaningful figure is an allocation, and where confidentiality obligations constrain who may see matter-level detail. Four definitions of utilisation circulate simultaneously, so partner behaviour responds to whichever figure appears in the meeting they attend.

Systems to plan for: practice management system, time recording, professional services automation, CRM and finance system. Matter confidentiality and information barriers must be inherited by analytics through row-level security, not re-implemented loosely.

Construction and real estate

Project cost and progress data with subcontractor valuations, variations and retentions, plus asset and tenancy data on the property side. Project reporting runs monthly on manually consolidated spreadsheets, so a problem contract is identified two months after it turned. Subcontractor payment and tax reporting obligations apply, and health and safety records carry their own retention duties.

A medallion layout for a software and technology business

The medallion pattern is not complicated, and it is routinely implemented badly: a bronze layer that has already lost fidelity, a silver layer with no testable rules, and a gold layer that is really just the silver layer with different names. Here is how we would lay it out for a Greystones client in software and technology.

Capacity sizing and what it really costs

Fabric capacity is billed by capacity unit. An F2 is roughly US$0.36 per hour pay-as-you-go, about US$260 a month, with around 40 per cent off for a one-year reservation. An F64, the smallest SKU at which report consumers no longer need an individual Pro licence, is roughly US$8,400 a month pay-as-you-go or around US$5,000 reserved.

The arithmetic that matters: F64 only becomes cheaper than per-user licensing somewhere in the region of 350 to 600 readers, depending on the discount you actually pay and whether you reserve capacity. Below that, Pro or PPU per user is normally the right answer, and buying capacity for prestige is a straightforward waste of money.

We size capacity by measuring rather than estimating: each workload profiled for compute shape, background refresh against interactive query, concurrency and peak hours, then validated on a short-lived trial capacity with your real data. The output is a sizing model that states expected utilisation at launch, at double the readers, and the specific point at which you would need the next SKU. Always price from the current Microsoft rate card for your region and agreement. Any figure in an article older than a quarter should be treated as an order of magnitude, not a quote.

Direct Lake, import or DirectQuery

With Direct Lake the model reads Delta directly from OneLake, so there is no refresh to schedule and no query round trip. The catch is the condition attached: anything unsupported falls back, and you are then on SQL endpoint performance without having chosen it. We test it against an import model on your own data and choose on the measured result. In practice Direct Lake tends to win on large, frequently landing tables, which software and technology workloads often are, while import still wins on smaller models with heavy DAX.

Migrating from what you have now

Few Greystones organisations start from nothing. The realistic options are a serving-layer-first adoption, where Fabric takes the gold layer and reporting while existing engineering stays in place, or a domain-by-domain migration with the old platform retained until each domain is validated. Both keep the old platform running until each domain is proven. The alternative, moving everything at once, is how migrations end up reversed. The reference pipeline we build first is usually the system that hurts most, which here is normally billing and subscription platform.

Residency, latency and the Ireland question

North Europe sits in Dublin, so Irish organisations get in-country residency on the region most of Europe treats as its default. The practical consequence is excellent latency and a short list of residency questions, though cross-border processing still has to be documented where a service falls back to another region.

For Greystones specifically, North Europe (Dublin) is the normal choice. Latency from Greystones to that region is not usually a constraint for analytical workloads; the constraints that bite are feature availability per region and the processor chain your data protection officer will ask about.

• Ireland hosts the EU establishment of many multinationals, so the DPC is frequently the lead supervisory authority, which raises the bar on analytics documentation well above local headcount.
• The Central Bank's outsourcing and operational resilience expectations apply to cloud analytics platforms used by regulated firms.
• EU-level obligations (DORA, NIS2, CSRD and the AI Act) apply in full, and the Irish implementation timetable is worth tracking per obligation.

Where to go next

If you are weighing a platform decision for a Greystones organisation, a workload assessment will answer it with evidence in two to three weeks, and the written recommendation is yours whatever you decide. Book a technical review.

We work across Ireland and deliver into neighbouring markets regularly. Nearby pages worth reading if your group has sites elsewhere: Galway, Bray, Sligo, Dublin, Limerick and Dundalk.

Frequently asked questions