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

Microsoft Fabric is a genuine step forward and a genuine way to spend money quickly, and which one you get depends almost entirely on decisions made in the first fortnight.

This page is about building a data platform for an organisation in Mechelen, Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse, Data Factory and the lakehouse patterns underneath them, with the local economy taken seriously. Mechelen's base in logistics and freight, food and drink manufacturing, and professional and legal services 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 a strategic logistics position between Brussels and Antwerp and food production and distribution.

Does a Mechelen 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 Mechelen

Food and drink manufacturing

Short shelf life, high SKU churn, promotional volatility and retailer scorecards that measure you on their definitions rather than yours. Source systems typically include ERP, MES, warehouse management, retailer EDI and scorecards and quality systems.

For a platform design, the consequence is specific. Internal service levels read green while the retailer scorecard reads amber, because the two measure different events. So the architecture has to make the raw grain replayable rather than aggregating at ingestion, and the first serving model should be a production and waste model aligned to retailer scorecard definitions, so commercial conversations use the customer's own numbers.

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.

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. ARR comes from a finance spreadsheet with manual adjustments, so restating a prior period requires archaeology and diligence becomes painful. Product telemetry on identifiable users needs a lawful basis and consent handling, and SOC 2 or ISO 27001 evidence often covers the analytics estate.

A medallion layout for a food and drink manufacturing 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 Mechelen client in food and drink manufacturing.

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 food and drink manufacturing workloads often are, while import still wins on smaller models with heavy DAX.

Migrating from what you have now

Few Mechelen 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 avoid a big-bang cutover, which is the pattern that produces the rollbacks we get called in to repair. The reference pipeline we build first is usually the system that hurts most, which here is normally ERP.

Residency, latency and the Belgium question

Most Belgian deployments land in West Europe, which is physically in the Netherlands, or in France Central. Microsoft has announced a Belgian datacentre region, so check current availability before committing to an architecture that assumes in-country residency, and in the meantime document the EU-but-not-Belgian position for your data protection officer.

For Mechelen specifically, West Europe (Netherlands) is the normal primary with France Central (Paris) as the pair. Latency from Mechelen 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.

• Belgium's federal structure means some reporting obligations sit with the regions (Flanders, Wallonia and Brussels) rather than nationally, which multiplies the datasets a single organisation must produce.
• Language legislation affects employee-facing systems: reporting used in employment contexts may need to be available in the language of the region where staff are employed.
• As the host of the EU institutions, Brussels has an unusual concentration of organisations working to EU-level reporting rules ahead of national implementation.

Where to go next

If you are weighing a platform decision for a Mechelen 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 Belgium and deliver into neighbouring markets regularly. Nearby pages worth reading if your group has sites elsewhere: Aalst, Mouscron, Wavre, Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent.

Frequently asked questions