What's changed: Added §4.4 "Microsoft Fabric (Unified Analytics Platform)" to fix the drift from the 2026 refresh that centers the analytics domain on Fabric/OneLake/lakehouse/Real-Time Intelligence/Data Activator. Adds Fabric alongside the existing Synapse-centric content
4.4Microsoft Fabric (Unified Analytics Platform)
Understand Microsoft Fabric, which became the center of the DP-900 analytics domain in the 2026 update. Fabric is a SaaS unified analytics platform bundling ingestion, data engineering, warehousing, real-time analytics, data science, and Power BI—all running on a single data lake, OneLake.
Analytics used to be built by combining several services—Data Factory to ingest, Synapse for large-scale analytics, Power BI to visualize, and so on. Microsoft Fabric is a unified analytics platform that bundles those workloads into a single SaaS product. In the 2026 update, the DP-900 analytics domain was reorganized around Fabric. Its defining trait is that every workload runs on a single data lake, OneLake.
4.4.1OneLake — one data lake for the org
OneLake is a single data lake for the whole organization (often likened to "OneDrive for analytics"). Data is stored in one place in open formats (Delta/Parquet), and every workload uses the same data directly without making copies—eliminating the effort and inconsistency of duplicating data per service.
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