OneLake is the absolute core of Microsoft Fabric. Fabric only recently entered public preview but is already a much anticipated AI-powered data analytics program. It aims to reshape how we use, access and manage all the data and insights in one environment that has access to all data sources and analytics services needed.
But data analytics can’t exist without data. Data is the lifeblood of any company and any IT Support Company can tell you that without a good system to use and manage it, a business will struggle to grow and run effectively or efficiently. With data, we can find trends, make better-informed business decisions and find solutions to problems.
But the amount of data collected over time used for data analytics is monumental. With so much data we need a place to store and manage it. OneLake is essentially the OneDrive for data.
Microsoft made OneLake to be a single, unified, logical data lake for the whole company that uses it. Similarly to OneDrive, every Microsoft Fabric tenant automatically comes with OneLake.
And just like OneDrive, the data on OneLake is easily accessible by using OneLake’s file explorer so that navigating workspaces and all the data is simple enough for even the most non-technical business users. In OneLake file explorer users can easily upload, modify and download all files just like how you would with OneDrive.
A data lake is unlike your standard cloud storage. It’s a space that can hold hundreds of terabytes of structured, semistructured and unstructured data. Anything from text documents and images to rigid relational databases can be stored, processed and secured. Further, OneLake is open at every level which means that because it’s built on top of Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2, it can support any file type.
Before OneLake companies would rather create multiple data lakes for different groups rather than deal with a singular, complex and harder-to-manage system with a single lake that is rife with both siloes and redundant data.
What sets OneLake apart according to expert providers of IT Support in London is that it focuses on having one central, complete, ready-to-go enterprise-wide data lake that is provided as a SaaS service.
This provides a well-controlled system where there are clear governance and compliance boundaries that are all controlled by tenant admin and policies. It allows for better collaboration as it’s open to every user across the company to contribute without any friction.
Similar to how users can create Teams channels and SharePoint sites without admin permission, OneLake has workspaces that can be created for each part of the company that has all its own administrators and access controls but they are all contained within the same data lake.
And lastly, a feature that Office 365 Consultants appreciate is the fact that OneLake aims to provide a space where data movement and duplication is no longer needed and there is only one copy of data. This means that users don’t have to copy data to use on another engine or break down silos for data to be analysed with other data.
This works thanks to shortcuts. OneLake allows users to connect different data items across different domains so there is no need for data duplication, movement or even changing ownership of the data.
This is very similar to regular Windows shortcuts. Each shortcut is just a symbolic link that functions as metadata to point from one location to another in the data lake. All shortcuts reflect the original data and if any data changes in the original file then the shortcut copy will be automatically synced.
In summary, OneLake has simplified data management and Microsoft Fabric would not function without it. This data lake has provided a great space for the sharing and distribution of data. It really has opened a new era of data analytics and data management. Although Fabric and OneLake have only been in public preview there is still plenty of excitement for the future.
