When organisations call Onyx in a panic about Fabric, the conversation rarely starts with features.

It usually starts with a human.

A DBA who has kept the lights on for 15 years and is suddenly being told “we’re moving everything to Fabric.”
A Power BI admin who woke up one morning as the default “Fabric admin” because that’s where the toggle lives.
A platform owner who quietly wonders, “Am I still the right person for this job?”

If that’s you, this series is for you.

Not the shiny demo version of your role—the real one. The version where you’re juggling governance, cost, performance, and politics… and Fabric has just added a few more spinning plates.

This isn’t a tutorial. It’s a field report from someone who spends most days between three groups of people:

• Execs who want Fabric “live yesterday”.

• Data teams trying not to create Technical Debt 2.0.

• Admins caught in the crossfire.

The old mental model is breaking

For years, the division of labour was almost comforting:

• DBAs guarded the back end—servers, databases, backup jobs, performance.

• Power BI admins governed the front end—tenants, workspaces, self‑service chaos.

Two worlds. Two toolsets. Two sets of problems.

Fabric doesn’t respect that boundary.

When you unify engineering, warehousing, real‑time, data science, and BI into one SaaS platform, you also unify the blast radius of every decision. A single permission model, a shared capacity, one place to break things beautifully or catastrophically.

From the outside, that’s sold as “one coherent experience.”

From the inside, it means this:

Somebody owns the whole thing.
And that somebody is starting to look suspiciously like… you.

Not “DBA you” or “Power BI admin you”. The version of you that understands what happens when data, people, and workloads collide at scale.

If you grew up as a DBA…

Most DBAs I speak with carry the same muscle memory:

• You remember exactly where you were when a SAN failed.

• You’ve tuned queries at ridiculous hours because a report had to go out.

• You’ve spent years balancing “technically correct” with “business will actually sign this off.”

Fabric takes away a lot of your old toys: no box to hug, no SAN to stare at, no backup script to tinker with.

That can feel like a loss of control.

But look at what comes back in its place:

• Architecture over instances. You’re no longer arguing about one server’s config; you’re shaping how Lakehouses, Warehouses, and capacities hang together so the whole estate doesn’t wobble under real usage.

• End‑to‑end risk, not just database risk. Your security brain now spans lineage, workspaces, domains, and how data moves across the business—not just inside a single engine.

• Cost as a first‑class performance metric. Disk and CPU used to be the constraints; now it’s capacity SKUs, concurrency, and whether a workload belongs in that capacity at all.

You’ve always been the person who sees failure modes before everyone else. Fabric just gives you a bigger surface to protect.

If you grew up as a Power BI admin…

Power BI admins have been doing “platform owner” work for a long time—just without the title.

You’ve wrestled with:

• Tenant defaults that could make or break governance overnight.

• Workspace sprawl and shadow IT.

• Well‑meaning analysts turning one dataset into 40 almost‑identical versions.

Fabric doesn’t demote you; it admits what was already true.

You’re no longer only deciding who can publish a report. You’re influencing:

• Who can spin up Lakehouses and Warehouses.

• How Spark, pipelines, and RTI are allowed to run.

• Where the line sits between experimentation and production.

All the things you used to worry about at the “report” layer—adoption, performance, ownership—now apply to the entire platform.

If that sounds daunting, remember: you already know how to think about governance in a way most project teams don’t. Fabric needs that more than ever.

Why this convergence actually makes sense

From the outside, it looks like two separate roles colliding.

From the inside, the overlap has always been there:

• Same non‑negotiables. Performance, security, and governance have always been the real job, no matter what your badge said. Fabric simply surfaces that at platform scale.

• Same trajectory away from manual work. The best DBAs and admins moved to automation, scripting, and APIs years ago. Fabric leans into that mindset.

• Same move up the value chain. Neither group wants to spend their career clicking through portals. You’ve already been pushing into questions like, “Is this worth the capacity?” and “Does this design survive next year?”

So when people ask, “Who should own Fabric?” my answer is usually:

Take the DBA who understands reliability and failure.
Combine them with the Power BI admin who understands people, usage, and governance.
Give them the mandate—and space—to act like a platform team, not a ticket queue.

That’s your Fabric Platform Admin.

This is a promotion, not a demotion

The market doesn’t always frame it that way. It can sound like:

“We don’t need DBAs anymore; the cloud handles that.”
“Power BI admin is just a toggle role; Fabric is where the ‘real’ work is.”

Neither is true.

What’s actually happening is this:

• The surface area you’re responsible for is bigger.

• The conversations you’re in are more strategic.

• The mistakes you can prevent are far more expensive than a single bad report refresh.

That’s not the end of your career. That’s the moment it steps up a weight class.

But promotions come with a cost: you can’t cling to the comfort of “I only own this corner” anymore. The business expects you to have an opinion on the whole platform.

So what changes on Monday morning?

Mindset is great. It doesn’t fix your queue.

In the next parts of this series, I want to get concrete about what this looks like in real life:

• How a Fabric platform admin should actually spend the week—what to stop doing, what to delegate, and what you should personally own.

• The governance patterns we see working across clients when DBAs and Power BI admins come together as a single platform team.

• How to talk to leadership about this role so they understand it’s not “nice to have”—it’s the difference between Fabric being an asset and Fabric becoming the next expensive mess.

If you’re the person quietly holding your organisation’s data estate together right now, you’re not “old guard.”

You’re exactly who Fabric was built for—provided you’re willing to let your role get bigger than the job title you started with.

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