Learn the definitions of terms used in Microsoft Fabric, including terms specific to Fabric Data Engineering, Data Factory, Fabric Data Science, Fabric Data Warehouse, IQ, Real-Time Intelligence, and Power BI.
General terms
Capacity
Dedicated compute resources for Fabric workloads.
Capacity defines the ability of a resource to perform an activity or to produce output. Different items consume different capacity at a certain time.
Direct Lake
Query Delta tables directly without import.
Experience
An Experience in Fabric refers to a specific workload environment or toolset designed for a particular data task.
Examples of Experiences
- Microsoft Fabric Data Engineering
- Microsoft Fabric Data Factory
- Microsoft Fabric Data Science
- Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse
- Microsoft Fabric Power BI
- Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence
Experiment
An Experiment in Fabric is used in data science and machine learning to track multiple model training runs and compare results.
IQ
Ontology (preview) is an item where you can define entity types, relationships, properties, and other constraints to organize data according to your business vocabulary.
Item
An item is an object that actually created. It is a set of capabilities within a workload. Users can create, edit, and delete them. Each item type provides different capabilities. For example, the Data Engineering workload includes the lakehouse, notebook, and Spark job definition items.
| Experience | Item |
|---|---|
| Data Engineering | Lakehouse |
| Data Factory | Pipeline |
| Data Warehouse | Warehouse |
| Power BI | Report |
| Real-Time Analytics | Eventstream |
Lakehouse
Combines data lake storage with data warehouse features.
A lakehouse is a database built over a data lake, containing files, folders, and tables. It is used by the Apache Spark engine and SQL engine for big data processing. Lakehouses support ACID transactions when using the open-source Delta formatted tables. The lakehouse item is hosted within a unique workspace folder in Microsoft OneLake.
Liquid Clustering
Adaptive clustering mechanism for Delta tables
OneLake
A single, unified data lake for the entire Fabric tenant.
Shortcut
Shortcuts are embedded references within OneLake that point to other file store locations. They provide a way to connect to existing data without having to directly copy it.
V-order
V-Order (Vertical Order) is a column-oriented data layout optimization used in Fabric Lakehouse to improve analytic query performance, especially for Power BI Direct Lake.
A write optimization to the parquet file format that enables fast reads and provides cost efficiency and better performance. All the Fabric engines write v-ordered parquet files by default.
Workload / Experience
In Microsoft Fabric, a Workload (also called an Experience) is a functional area of the platform that provides a specific type of analytics capability.
Each workload has:
- Its own UI
- Its own tools
- Its own compute behavior
- But shares OneLake and security
Workspace
A logical container for Fabric items.
Appendix