Glossary

What is Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric is Microsoft's unified analytics platform. It combines data engineering, integration, real-time analytics, data science, and business intelligence into a single SaaS environment, built around OneLake, a centralized data lake. Fabric is Microsoft's answer to multi-vendor stacks like Databricks plus Snowflake plus Power BI, packaged into one product.

Where Fabric stops is also useful to know. Fabric stores data, prepares data, and analyzes data. It does not, on its own, govern how downstream consumers reach that data per person, per agent, or per application. That is a different layer.

Why Microsoft Fabric exists

Enterprises running on Microsoft typically end up with analytical data scattered across Azure SQL, Dataverse, Synapse, and individual Power BI workspaces. Each lives in its own format with its own access model. Building anything cross-system means stitching pipelines together, copying data into intermediate locations, and reconciling definitions across tools.

Fabric collapses that into one platform. OneLake holds all the data in a single open format. Compute engines (Spark notebooks, SQL endpoints, Power BI semantic models) run against the same storage. Data pipelines move data into and around Fabric without exporting to side systems.

The result is a unified analytical foundation, particularly attractive to Microsoft-aligned enterprises that already have Power BI and Dataverse.

What Fabric includes

One SaaS environment, many workloads, one shared storage layer.

OneLake

A unified storage layer built on Delta Lake. Every Fabric workload reads and writes here, so the same data is available to engineers, analysts, and BI without duplication.

Compute engines

Spark notebooks for data engineering, SQL endpoints for warehousing, KQL queries for real-time analytics, and Power BI semantic models for reporting, all running over OneLake.

Pipelines and BI

Data Factory moves data into and around Fabric. Power BI sits on top of the semantic models for dashboards, reports, and ad-hoc analysis.

Where Fabric ends and the access layer begins

Fabric is the data platform. It stores data, computes over data, and visualizes data. What it does not do is govern how every downstream consumer reaches that data once it leaves Fabric or Dataverse.

Questions Fabric does not answer on its own:

  • When a Copilot agent asks for "active customers," whose definition wins, and how is it enforced consistently across every consumer that asks?
  • How does one AI agent get read access to LeaseAgreements while another agent has full CRUD, without duplicating Dataverse security roles?
  • When a partner-facing app queries data, does it inherit the same business rules and audit trail the internal BI report does?
  • How do you log per-agent activity separately from per-user activity for compliance?

These are access-layer questions. A governed access layer like dhino is a strong fit on top of Fabric: Fabric gives you the data; the access layer gives every consumer a governed path to it.

How dhino fits with Microsoft Fabric

A typical Fabric customer uses dhino above Fabric and Dataverse to expose templates that downstream consumers (people, AI agents, applications, partner APIs) can call. The templates carry business definitions, access rules, and audit. Fabric carries the data and compute. They are complementary, not competing.

The same dhino template can serve a business user through Fetch, a Copilot agent through dhino Trust, and a partner system through Publish, all reading from data that lives in Fabric or Dataverse underneath.

For a side-by-side view of where dhino sits relative to Fabric and other tools, see how dhino compares.

Related terms

Semantic data layer

The access-layer pattern that sits above Fabric to serve governed data to every consumer.

Data governance

What the access layer above Fabric enforces per consumer, beyond what Fabric storage provides on its own.

Microsoft Power Platform

Where most Fabric consumers live: Power BI, Power Apps, Copilot Studio, and Power Automate, all reading from OneLake or Dataverse.

See a governed access layer on top of Fabric

Tell us what your Fabric and Dataverse setup looks like. We will show you where a governed access layer changes what your downstream consumers can do safely.