Microsoft Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate Study Guide

Part I. Preparing Data

An analytics platform, especially one as comprehensive as Microsoft Fabric, is fundamentally useless without a reliable, consistent flow of data. Getting data into the system is not just a necessary first step; it’s a critical process that requires you to understand various source connections, ingestion methods, and optimal storage destinations. In a platform designed for end-to-end analytics, data can originate from countless systems, and you need to be proficient in utilizing a variety of tools, from simple connections in Power BI to sophisticated ingestion capabilities like dataflows. Moreover, with powerful, purpose-built storage services like the lakehouse, warehouse, and eventhouse, you need to choose the right place to put your data to maximize performance and govern your analytical workloads.

In this part, we’ll explore how you can master all these tasks to build a solid data foundation in Fabric.

We begin by guiding you through the primary entry points into the Fabric portal, where you’ll manage and create new data connections. Next, we cover the hands-on process of creating these new connections using both the familiar Power BI Desktop application and the Fabric portal web experience. After that, we introduce the two main pathways for discovering and monitoring your assets: the OneLake catalog and the Real-Time hub, which provide a high-level view of your data estate. We then cover the central OneLake service, the unified storage layer for nearly ...