Cloud data warehouses · Microsoft Corporation

Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft's SaaS analytics platform unifying warehousing, lakehouse, pipelines, Power BI, and real-time analytics on OneLake.

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Microsoft Fabric is a SaaS analytics platform that unifies data warehousing, data engineering, real-time intelligence, and Power BI under a single capacity model and one open storage layer called OneLake, built on Delta Lake tables. Rather than provisioning separate services, customers buy Fabric capacity (F-SKUs, from F2 upward) that is shared across a Warehouse item (SQL-based, fully managed data warehouse), Lakehouse item (Spark-based), Data Factory pipelines, Real-Time Intelligence (KQL databases and eventstreams), and Power BI reporting. Because everything reads and writes the same OneLake Delta tables, warehouse and lakehouse workloads can share data without copying it. Fabric is Microsoft's designated successor to Synapse Analytics and Power BI Premium capacity, and is available only as a managed Azure/Microsoft 365 cloud service.

At a glance

Vendor Microsoft Corporation
Pricing model Usage-based
Free tier Yes
Deployment Cloud
Open source No
Best for Microsoft-centric organizations wanting warehouse, lakehouse, and BI on one capacity and one copy of the data.

Pricing

Billed as reserved or pay-as-you-go Fabric capacity units (F2 through F8192+), shared across warehouse, lakehouse, pipeline, and Power BI workloads; a free trial capacity is offered, and 1-/3-year reservations discount the pay-as-you-go rate by roughly 41%.

Checked on the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026: no prices are published. Expect to be quoted.

Features

  • Unified OneLake storage layer built on open Delta Lake tables
  • SQL-based Warehouse item alongside a Spark-based Lakehouse item
  • Shared F-SKU capacity across warehouse, lakehouse, and BI workloads
  • Native Power BI integration with Direct Lake mode
  • Real-Time Intelligence with KQL databases and eventstreams
  • Data Factory-style pipelines and dataflows for ingestion
  • Copilot-assisted data engineering and report authoring

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Head to head

Alternatives

Azure Synapse Analytics Microsoft's unified analytics service combining a dedicated SQL data warehouse, serverless SQL, and Apache Spark pools. Databricks Managed lakehouse platform, built by Apache Spark's creators, combining Spark-based compute with governance and ML tooling. Snowflake Cloud-native data warehouse that separates storage and compute and bills usage in per-second credits.

Microsoft Fabric in the index now

Terms to know

Data warehouse A centralized, structured database optimized for fast historical reporting rather than day-to-day transactions. Data lakehouse A storage architecture that adds warehouse-style structure and transactions directly on top of low-cost data lake storage. Business intelligence (BI) The practice of turning company data into dashboards, reports and metrics that guide business decisions. Semantic layer A layer that defines business metrics and dimensions once, centrally, so every tool and report uses the same numbers.

Related guides

How to choose a cloud data warehouse Start from your cloud, your pricing tolerance and your workload shape — general BI, high-concurrency apps, or enterprise mixed workloads — not the feature list.