What is Lakehouse

Definition

In Microsoft Fabric, a lakehouse is a unified analytics store that combines the flexible file storage of a data lake with the structured querying of a warehouse over data held in OneLake, letting engineers and analysts work with both files and tables in one governed location.

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Stores files and structured tables together over OneLake
Serves both data engineering and SQL analytics from one store
Avoids copying data between a separate lake and warehouse
Integrates natively with Fabric notebooks, pipelines, and Power BI

Real World Example

A Fabric team lands raw sensor files in a lakehouse, transforms them into Delta tables with notebooks, and reports on them in Power BI, all within one OneLake-backed store rather than moving data across systems.

FAQs

What is a Fabric lakehouse?

It is a Fabric item combining lake-style file storage and warehouse-style tables over OneLake, queryable with both Spark and SQL.

How does it relate to OneLake?

A lakehouse stores its data in OneLake, Fabric's unified lake, so the same data is accessible across Fabric workloads.

When use a lakehouse versus a warehouse in Fabric?

A lakehouse suits mixed file and table, data-engineering-led work, while the warehouse suits SQL-first, structured analytics.