Lakehouse

In the Ultra Transcenders books

DP-600DP-700

Each book explains Lakehouse in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• General-purpose v1

  The older storage account kind (Storage), which lacks access tiers, Archive and premium file shares and retires on 13 October 2026. Converting to ZRS requires first upgrading to GPv2, a one-way change.

• 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.

• SQL analytics endpoint

  Read-only SQL access in Fabric to the data in a lakehouse. Power BI using DirectQuery through it performs more slowly than Direct Lake.

• T-SQL

  The dialect of SQL that Microsoft uses for Azure SQL and SQL Server. Azure Monitor logs are queried with KQL instead.

Related terms

• Amazon S3

  The object storage service in Amazon's cloud. Through a OneLake shortcut, an S3 bucket's data can show up in a Microsoft Fabric lakehouse with no copy made, though such shortcuts can only be read from.

• Analytical data processing

  Working with big sets of historical data or business measures, mostly reading rather than writing, typically after loading them into a lake, warehouse or lakehouse and on into a semantic model for reporting. It contrasts with OLTP, or transactional, workloads.

• Data clustering

  A Fabric Data Warehouse preview capability that, as data is loaded, keeps rows with similar values in up to four chosen columns physically together, letting filtered queries avoid reading irrelevant files. You set it once with WITH (CLUSTER BY (...)) in CREATE TABLE or CTAS and cannot alter it afterwards; lakehouse Delta liquid clustering is a different feature.

• Data destination

  Where a Dataflow Gen2 query writes its results, for example a lakehouse, a warehouse or an Azure SQL database. Each query may have a different one, and sending output to a warehouse needs staging enabled.

• Data lakehouse

  Combines a lake and a warehouse: raw data stays as files, yet Delta Lake lets you query it as SQL tables. Fabric Lakehouse and the lakehouse in Databricks work this way.

• Databricks SQL

  Brings warehousing to an Azure Databricks lakehouse. ANSI SQL runs against Delta tables using SQL warehouses, compute tuned for heavy query concurrency and BI tools.

• Dataflow Gen2

  A visual, low-code Microsoft Fabric item for preparing data, based on Power Query. It links to data sources, transforms the data and writes the output to targets like a lakehouse or a warehouse.

• Default lakehouse

  Pinned to a notebook, it determines where relative Files/ and Tables/ paths and Spark SQL table names without a qualifier point. If you switch to another lakehouse or rename it, the session must be restarted.