Microsoft Fabric groups its features into workloads, each serving a role or job, for instance Power BI, Real-Time Intelligence, Data Warehouse, Data Factory or Data Engineering; they all read and write the same OneLake data.
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Terms in this definition
- Microsoft Fabric
Analytics platform from Microsoft delivered as SaaS on top of OneLake, offering capabilities including Direct Lake and shortcuts.
- Document Intelligence add-on capabilities
Extra Document Intelligence options switched on with the features query parameter: barcodes, formulas, keyValuePairs, languages, ocrHighResolution, queryFields and styleFont.
- Role
How an actor normally or expectedly behaves, or the part a person takes in a process. A single actor may hold more than one role.
- Job
A sequence of steps executed together on one agent or runner, or on the server for agentless work. While running, each occupies one of your parallel jobs.
- Power BI
Microsoft's analytics and reporting service. It reaches data held on-premises through the on-premises data gateway.
- Real-Time Intelligence
Microsoft Fabric's workload for data in motion. Using eventstreams, eventhouses with KQL databases, the Real-Time hub, Real-Time Dashboards and Activator, it takes in events, processes, stores and analyses them, and acts on them.
- Data warehouse
Built for analysis instead of transaction processing, this relational store usually links facts to dimensions using a snowflake or star layout. Microsoft's present offering is Fabric Warehouse.
- Azure Data Factory
Managed data integration service for ETL and ELT, built from pipelines, copy activities, triggers, mapping data flows and integration runtimes. It works in batches rather than routing individual transactions.
Related terms
- Fabric Data Factory
Presented as the next step on from Azure Data Factory, this Fabric workload moves and reshapes data using copy jobs, mirroring, Dataflow Gen2 and pipelines.
- OneLake
Built on Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, it is the one logical data lake for an entire Microsoft Fabric tenant, provisioned automatically, and the place where every Fabric workload keeps its data.