Introduction
The foundation of Microsoft Fabric is a lakehouse, which is built on top of the OneLake scalable storage layer and uses Apache Spark and SQL compute engines for big data processing. A lakehouse is a unified platform that combines:
- The flexible and scalable storage of a data lake
- The ability to query and analyze data of a data warehouse
Imagine your company has been using a data warehouse to store structured data from its transactional systems, such as order history, inventory levels, and customer information. You collect unstructured data from social media, website logs, and external sources that are difficult to manage and analyze using the existing data warehouse infrastructure. Your company's new directive is to improve its decision-making capabilities by analyzing data in various formats across multiple sources, so the company chooses Microsoft Fabric.
In this module, we explore how a lakehouse in Microsoft Fabric provides a scalable and flexible data store for files and tables that you can query using SQL.