Glossary
Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft's unified data platform that subsumes Power BI and the rest of the Azure data stack.
Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft's unified data analytics platform, launched in 2023. It bundles Power BI, Data Factory, Synapse Data Warehouse, Synapse Data Engineering, Synapse Data Science, Real-Time Analytics, and Data Activator into a single platform running on shared Fabric capacity (F-SKUs). The unifying layer is OneLake, a single data lake auto-provisioned per tenant, with shortcuts to external storage. Direct Lake mode for Power BI semantic models reads OneLake Parquet files directly. Microsoft is steering Power BI Premium customers onto Fabric capacities; new analytics features increasingly ship Fabric-first.