Fabric preview unifies storage before uniform security rollout

Microsoft opened Fabric’s public preview on 23 May, combining Data Factory, Synapse and Power BI around OneLake. The free trial provides fixed capacity without requiring a credit card.

Photo: efes, 2015. Original photograph via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 1.0. Recompressed; responsive crops.

Microsoft says its shared data layer defaults to Delta over Parquet. Warehouse shortcut queries specifically require Delta tables. OneLake shortcuts support ADLS Gen2 and Amazon S3; Google Storage is planned. Uniform table, column and row security across engines is also forthcoming.

The warehouse’s launch notes describe SQL GRANT, REVOKE and DENY controls. They stress functionality over performance, concurrency and scale for this preview.

Copilot and Data Activator remain forthcoming. Shared storage aims to reduce copying, but it isn’t evidence of finished cross-engine governance or production-scale performance.