Microsoft Fabric

In the Ultra Transcenders books

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

Terms in this definition

• SaaS

  A cloud model in which you consume a finished application that the provider operates, Microsoft 365 for instance. Nearly everything is the provider's job; you look after your data, users and devices.

• 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.

• Direct Lake

  Mode for Fabric semantic models that loads Delta or Parquet files from OneLake straight into VertiPaq, giving almost import-level performance without duplicating data.

Related terms

• Activator

  Rather than just displaying data as a dashboard does, this Real-Time Intelligence tool in Microsoft Fabric reacts to it. You define rules without writing code, and once a pattern or condition is spotted it can send an email or Teams message, or start a Power Automate flow or Fabric pipeline.

• 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.

• Apache Spark

  An open-source engine that spreads data processing over a cluster of machines so that big data sets are handled in parallel, in batches or as streams. In Azure you can use it through Microsoft Fabric or Azure Databricks.

• Azure HDInsight

  Runs managed clusters for open-source big data frameworks, Hadoop, Spark, Hive and Kafka among them. For new analytics work, Microsoft's current guidance centres on Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks.

• Azure Synapse Link for Cosmos DB

  Feature for querying Cosmos DB's analytical column store without ETL and without using request units from the transactional store. New projects can no longer adopt it and should use Cosmos DB mirroring in Microsoft Fabric.

• 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.

• Dataverse

  The data store behind Power Platform; a shortcut can surface its data in Microsoft Fabric.

• Eventhouse

  Holds one or more KQL databases and is where Real-Time Intelligence in Microsoft Fabric keeps time-stamped streaming events for analysis, indexed by the moment they arrive.