OneLake

Sorry, my title indeed said “OneDrive” and that is actually by intention. It is really easy to mix them up, just look at this screenshot I did on my Laptop. It shows the file explorer and it very much looks the same. OneLake . OneLakes logo is also shown in the taskbar in the bottom right corner next to the clock in Windows, just like OneDrive.

At this point, I want to mention it, since I’ve fogotten to mention it in the last post. Currently, Microsoft Fabric is still in preview.

So what is the big deal with OneLake? Well, if you are using Fabric, you’ll notice that OneLake is pretty much the data center for any of Fabrics data experiences:

  • Data Factory
  • Synapse Data Engineering
  • Synapse Data Warehouse
  • Synapse Data Science
  • Synapse Real Time Analytics
  • Power BI

You could imagine this as a centre for all data. You want to provide data for Data Science? OneLake can provide you this. You also can use it for your DataLake to source your DWH in Fabric. Actually, you could imagine it as the center of Fabric.

OneLake Shortcuts

Microsoft also provides OneDrive Shortcuts. This is a Feature that allows you to unify your data in one place, hence avoiding duplication of your data. It is a virtualization of the data and you can access it from different experiences and places. In other words, you could imagine them as links that point to the actual places of data. I don’t want to go much deeper in this, because the previous link to Microsofts documentation is excellent.

OneLake as data driver

A lot of companies strive to be a data driven company. Understandably so, because it means that decisions that need to be taken, be it as an analyst, data scientist, data engineer or anyone of the C-level management, will be based on data. OneLake gives transparency to everyone to the structure that data may provide and any data worker can incorporate them in their work.

So in my opinion, OneLake helps to centralize data to any organization. Architects and Security Engineers need to define together with the business and other data workers, how to organize the data system in the organization. Once this is done, and security permissions are set, I believe, this will propel the mutual understanding of an organizations existing data across departements.

So this was about OneLake. In my next post, I will go deeper in Shortcuts to show you how to use them and to glide in to the next topic.