Understanding OneLake—A Technical Discussion

OneLake is the core data storage component in Microsoft Fabric. The illustration shows how OneLake hosted data can reside with an organization’s overall data estate. There are transactional databases (left), external cloud data solutions (right), and OneLake (middle), which can receive and store various data formats for analysis by Fabric components. In the middle are Fabric workspaces (labeled here as “US Analytics,” “EU Analytics,” and “Corp Analytics”) that represent the Fabric workspace, underlying OneLake data store, and the Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) storage account associated with the workspace.

Overview

OneLake is a data management layer that sits on top of ADLS to coordinate activity between Fabric experiences and the underlying data, enforce security and data governance processes, and handle data transfer between OneLake and external solutions. The service automatically deploys and configures an ADLS Storage account for each Fabric workspace, which is where OneLake stores the various data formats, along with other Fabric workspace-specific content like integration pipelines, notebooks, and scripts.