5.5 Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft's unified, SaaS analytics platform. It went generally available on November 15, 2023, and is now the strategic direction for every analytics workload that previously required stitching together Synapse, Data Factory, Azure Data Explorer, and Power BI. For DP-900 you need to recognize what Fabric is, how OneLake works, and which experience matches each scenario.

Quick Answer: Fabric is a single SaaS product that ships seven analytics experiences sharing one tenant-wide data lake (OneLake), one open storage format (Delta-Parquet), and one billing model (Fabric capacity, F-SKUs). Power BI Premium customers get Fabric included; everyone else can buy a Fabric capacity directly.

How Fabric Differs From Azure-Resource Analytics

Azure Synapse Analytics, ADF, and Azure Data Explorer are Azure resources — you create them inside an Azure subscription and resource group. Fabric is a SaaS service in the Microsoft 365 / Power BI tenant: it lives at app.fabric.microsoft.com, and you carve up a Fabric capacity into workspaces instead of resource groups.

This shift has real consequences:

• No infrastructure management. No clusters to size, no networking to wire, no patching.
• One copy of data. Every experience reads and writes the same OneLake files.
• One identity and governance. Microsoft Entra ID, sensitivity labels, and Purview integration apply across all experiences.
• One bill. Compute is unified under capacity units (CUs) measured against the F-SKU you purchase, with the ability to pause the capacity.

OneLake: The Heart of Fabric

OneLake is automatically provisioned with every Fabric tenant. It is conceptually similar to OneDrive for analytics data — one logical lake per tenant, organized into workspaces and items.

• All Fabric items store data as Delta-Parquet by default — Delta Lake on top of Parquet files.
• Shortcuts let a OneLake folder transparently reference data in another OneLake workspace, Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Dataverse. Data is queried in place, not copied.
• Mirroring continuously replicates data from operational sources (Azure SQL Database, Cosmos DB, Snowflake) into OneLake in near real-time, with no ETL.

The Seven Fabric Experiences

A workspace can contain items from any experience, all backed by OneLake.

Lakehouse vs Warehouse Inside Fabric

Fabric ships two SQL-capable items that often confuse beginners:

• Lakehouse — Spark-first. Created in the Data Engineering experience. Stores Delta tables, supports notebook-driven ELT, and exposes a SQL analytics endpoint that is read-only for T-SQL queries.
• Warehouse — SQL-first. Created in the Data Warehouse experience. Stores Delta tables too, but supports full multi-table T-SQL transactions (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, MERGE) and is the right home for traditional star-schema dimensional models.

Both write Delta-Parquet to OneLake, so a single Power BI semantic model can join data from a lakehouse and a warehouse without copying.

Direct Lake: Power BI Without Import

Direct Lake is a Power BI storage mode that is unique to Fabric. It loads Delta-Parquet files from OneLake directly into the VertiPaq engine on demand, without an Import refresh and without the round-trip latency of DirectQuery.

Direct Lake gives Power BI dashboards the freshness of DirectQuery with the speed of Import, because OneLake is already optimized columnar storage.

Medallion Architecture in Fabric

The bronze-silver-gold medallion pattern fits Fabric naturally:

1. Bronze Lakehouse — Land raw files from Data Factory pipelines, Eventstreams, or mirroring.
2. Silver Lakehouse — Cleansed and conformed Delta tables, built with Spark notebooks.
3. Gold Warehouse (or Gold Lakehouse) — Business-curated star schema. A Power BI semantic model in Direct Lake mode then reads gold tables for sub-second BI.

Capacities and SKUs

Compute is purchased as a Fabric capacity identified by an F-SKU such as F2, F8, F64, F2048. Capacity is measured in Capacity Units (CUs) and is shared across every experience in workspaces assigned to that capacity. F64 and above include free Power BI Pro licensing for all users in the tenant. Capacities can be paused to halt billing.

Governance and Security

Fabric inherits identity from Microsoft Entra ID. Workspace roles (Admin, Member, Contributor, Viewer) gate access at the container level, and item-level permissions narrow it further. Sensitivity labels, audit logs, and Microsoft Purview integration provide enterprise governance. Row-level security (RLS) and object-level security (OLS) work on warehouses, lakehouses, and Power BI semantic models alike.