Fabric Warehouse

Microsoft Fabric Warehouse is a pivotal component of the Microsoft Fabric platform, designed to provide customers with a comprehensive and unified solution for managing their data estate. This SaaS-ified data warehousing platform is inherently lake-centric, which means it places the data lake, specifically Microsoft Fabric's OneLake, at the core of its operations. OneLake, also known as Microsoft Fabric Lake, serves as a tenant-wide storage system built on Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS Gen2). It offers a simplified, unified experience for both professional data developers and citizen developers, eliminating the need for users to grapple with complex infrastructure concepts such as resource groups, role-based access control (RBAC), and Azure Resource Manager. This streamlined approach allows users to focus on their data analytics and AI workloads without the burden of infrastructure management.

OneLake revolutionizes data management by replacing the scattered and disjointed data silos created by individual developers with a single, unified storage system accessible to all. This harmonized approach enhances data sharing, policy enforcement, and security compliance across the organization. The system is designed to be hierarchical, enabling efficient data management within an organization. Users can create workspaces within their tenant, functioning as virtual folders, and within these workspaces, they can establish lakehouses. A lakehouse is a collection of files, folders, and tables that represent a database over a data lake, facilitating data organization and analysis.

Microsoft Fabric Warehouse is designed to accommodate a broad range of users, from citizen developers to professional data engineers and data administrators. It offers a user-friendly and easily accessible interface integrated with Power BI for streamlined data analysis and reporting. The platform's capabilities include industry-leading performance at scale, cross-database querying, and autonomous workload management. It excels in simplifying data warehousing by leveraging a lake-centric approach and an open data format, enabling users to focus on data preparation, analysis, and reporting, while eliminating the need for data duplication. With its efficient virtual warehouse creation and cross-database querying capabilities, Microsoft Fabric Warehouse unlocks the full potential of data sources, enabling rich insights and analysis while reducing the effort required for data integration and engineering.

The platform supports seamless integration with other Microsoft Fabric experiences like Spark, Pipelines, Power BI, and Azure Data Explorer, allowing users with different skill sets to work with the same data without duplication. Moreover, the separation of computin and storage, coupled with the use of the parquet file format and Delta Lake Logs, ensures robust security and full ACID transactional guarantees. Data ingestion, loading, and transformation can be achieved efficiently through various methods, such as Pipelines, Dataflows, cross-database querying, or the COPY INTO command. Microsoft Fabric Warehouse is a powerful solution for organizations looking to simplify their analytics estate, leverage the potential of their data lakes, and enhance data-driven decision-making.

Azure Synapse Analytics

data types we support

Integral
bigint (int8)
int (integer, int4)
smallint (int2)
decimal
decimal (dec, numeric, fixed)
double precision (double, float8)
float
money
real (float4)
text
char (bpchar, character)
text
varchar (character varying)
Binary
bit
Date/Time
date
time (timetz, time without time zone)
timestamp (timestamp without time zone, timestamp(2) without time zone)
timestamptz (timestamp with time zone, timestamp(2) with time zone)
Large objects
bytea
geography
geometry
text
xml
Other
array
boolean (bool)
cidr
citext
enum
hstore
inet
interval
json
jsonb
macaddr
oid
uuid
varbit (bit varying)