Analytics Engineering with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI

Chapter 7. Working with the Warehouse in Microsoft Fabric

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For many people, the Warehouse might be their first stop in Microsoft Fabric since it feels familiar. If you’ve ever worked with SQL Server or any relational database, you already know the basics: tables, views, stored procedures, and SQL queries. You work with it primarily using T-SQL, and the surface area feels very familiar.

Under the hood, a Fabric warehouse is much more than just a database. It’s a massively parallel processing (MPP) engine that processes huge volumes of data by spreading the work across multiple compute nodes, all while being fully managed so you don’t have to think about infrastructure. Behind the scenes, the distributed query engine automatically manages workloads, scaling compute and storage independently so performance is always there when you need it.

A Fabric Warehouse is still a relational system, but it’s built directly on top of Delta tables in OneLake. Delta tables store data as files in the open-standard ...