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MICROSOFT FABRICRetail

Real-Time Intelligence on Fabric: Sub-Second Retail Ops Analytics

Client
National Retail Chain
Industry
Retail
Duration
4 months
<5s
Event → alert latency
85%+
KQL cache-hit ratio
<60s
OneLake shortcut lag
6→1
Vendors consolidated
The Challenge

Where things stood before

Store operations depended on a legacy Kafka + custom Python service stack that took engineers days to modify. Alerts arrived minutes late and analytics teams couldn't correlate operational events with sales data without a nightly copy.

Our Approach

How we engineered the outcome

  • Migrated event ingestion from Kafka to Fabric Event Streams with CDC connectors.
  • Deployed an Eventhouse (KQL DB) tuned for time-series workloads with cache-hit >85%.
  • Configured Reflex actions to fire Teams alerts and ADF triggers on materialized conditions.
  • Enabled OneLake shortcuts to project KQL data into Delta for BI + ML consumption.
  • Layered dbt-fabric analytical models on top for historical trend reporting.
The Outcomes

Measurable business impact

<5s

Event → alert latency

85%+

KQL cache-hit ratio

<60s

OneLake shortcut lag

6→1

Vendors consolidated

Architecture Diagram

Reference Architecture

The reference architecture we deployed for this engagement, layer by layer.

Events
  • POS terminals
  • Store IoT sensors
  • OMS CDC
Ingest
  • Fabric Event Streams
  • CDC Connectors
Real-time
  • Eventhouse (KQL DB)
  • Reflex actions
Lakehouse
  • OneLake Shortcut → Delta
  • dbt-fabric models
Serve
  • Power BI Real-time
  • Teams alerts · ADF triggers
Before / After

The transformation, in numbers

Before
Event → alert latencyMinutes
Vendors6 (Kafka + custom)
Engineer change timeDays
Historical + real-timeSeparate
After
Event → alert latency<5 sec
Vendors1 (Fabric)
Engineer change timeHours
Historical + real-timeUnified