Following the announcements of Microsoft Fabric, OneLake is the component that sits at the core of Fabric’s lake-centric approach. Microsoft calls it: “The OneDrive for data”. Every Microsoft Fabric tenant automatically includes OneLake, a comprehensive and integrated data lake that serves the entire organisation… One tenant, OneLake.

It provides one data lake for the entire organisation, one copy of the data to be used across multiple analytical engines, and one security model living natively with the data in the lake.

All organisations aim to have a single data lake. Still, the reality is that in most cases, and for many reasons, organisations create multiple lakes for different business groups instead of having a single lake and collaborating on it. This approach creates silos, then companies create complex solutions for data movement to facilitate sharing and reuse which often leads to duplicated and sometimes out-of-sync data.

OneLake aims to tackle these challenges by improving collaboration.

Multiple workspaces can be created within a tenant, facilitating ownership distribution and access policies across different organisation segments. Workspaces are associated with specific regions and billed separately as part of their dedicated capacity. If data has residency restrictions, Fabric guarantees that data will stay in the workspace region while still being part of the same logical data lake.

Even organisations that use patterns like data mesh, with independent business owners that follow a domain-driven approach, can efficiently organise and manage their data by defining domains, classifying workspaces and having a more granular control on how data in each domain can be consumed.

Fabric introduces a remarkable feature called “shortcuts” to facilitate data sharing. Shortcuts enable organisations to establish data connections across business domains without the need for data movement. Shortcut refers to data stored in another location in a different workspace or even outside of OneLake, like ADLS or S3. From the end user’s perspective, the data is stored locally and can seamlessly integrate with other data, allowing for its utilisation across multiple analytical engines. Shortcuts will enforce RBAC at the two ends, in the workspace where it resides and the workspace of the referenced data.

Behind the scenes, OneLake has many ADLS Gen2 storage accounts created and managed by Fabric and are virtualised in a single data lake. Fabric handles the complexity of setting up these storages so the organisations can focus on the data and its governance, which matters. This is one of the most significant advantages of SaaS services. For those interested, we encourage you to explore Microsoft Fabric or contact BI4ALL to determine if this transformative solution aligns with your organisation’s specific needs.