Navigating Microsoft Fabric: A Practical Guide to Tool Selection

Microsoft Fabric is a lake-centric data analytics platform. All data items, like warehouses and lakehouses, store their data automatically in OneLake in Delta format. But which tools should you use, and when?

This session will cover:
- The underlying storage: Delta, Parquet, and columnar storage explained simply
- SQL vs. Spark: when to use each
- Notebooks vs. Dataflows vs. Pipelines: choosing the right approach
- Warehouses vs. Lakehouses: understanding the tradeoffs

This session requires no prior coding knowledge and covers terminology at an introductory level so you won’t get left behind. Ideal for data engineers, analysts, and IT staff looking to optimize storage and performance within Fabric.

Understand storage - Delta, Parquet, and Onelake Lear which ingestion and transformation tool to use and when Understand architecture decisions in Fabric