5.2.1. OneLake: The Foundation

💡 First Principle: OneLake is a single, logical data lake for your entire organization. Think of it as "OneDrive for data"—one namespace, automatic data organization, built-in governance. All Fabric workloads read from and write to OneLake, eliminating data silos.

OneLake Key Features

• Single namespace: All data appears under one logical hierarchy regardless of physical location
• Shortcuts: Virtual pointers to external data (AWS S3, ADLS Gen2, Google Cloud Storage) without copying
• Open format: Data stored as Delta Parquet by default—open, interoperable, no lock-in
• Automatic indexing: OneLake indexes all data for fast discovery