Microsoft Fabric is a unified, end-to-end analytics platform that combines data integration, engineering, warehousing, science, real-time intelligence, and business intelligence into a single SaaS offering. Built on OneLake — a centralized data lake storing all data in open Delta/Parquet format — Fabric eliminates data silos and enables seamless collaboration across teams. The platform uses a capacity-based pricing model measured in Compute Units (CUs) purchased as F-SKUs, where workloads draw from a shared pool. As of 2026, Fabric serves over 31,000 customers and has introduced major additions including SQL Database in Fabric, Materialized Lake Views, Fabric IQ, OneLake Security, and an MCP Server integration — understanding these alongside the foundational item types is essential for building scalable, governed data solutions.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 15 focused tables and 115 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
Table 1: Core Platform Components
These are the structural pieces every Fabric solution is built from — the lake that holds the data, the workspaces and capacity that organize and power it, and the item types like lakehouse, warehouse, semantic model, and eventhouse where the actual work happens. Grasp how these nest inside one another and you understand most of how Fabric is laid out, right up to the newer governance and AI layers such as the OneLake Catalog, Fabric IQ, and Domains.
| Component | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
All workspaces store data in OneLake/MyWorkspace/MyLakehouse/ | • Single unified data lake for all Fabric data • automatically provisioned with every tenant • stores data in open Delta Parquet format • supports ADLS Gen2 APIs. | |
Sales Analytics Workspace | • Logical container for Fabric items (lakehouses, pipelines, reports) • assigned to a capacity • supports role-based access (Admin, Member, Contributor, Viewer). | |
F64 SKU = 64 CUs | • Compute and storage pool purchased as SKUs (F2–F2048) • measured in Capacity Units • supports pay-as-you-go or reserved pricing • workloads consume CUs dynamically. | |
Bronze/Silver/Gold lakehouse layers | • Combines data lake flexibility with warehouse querying • stores structured/unstructured data in Delta format • includes automatic SQL analytics endpoint. | |
Enterprise data warehouse | • Fully managed T-SQL engine for structured analytics • optimized for BI reporting • supports stored procedures, views, security. |