Summary: Microsoft Fabric introduces OneLake, a single, unified, logical data lake for the entire organization. It eliminates data silos and movement by allowing all analytics engines to operate on a single copy of data.

Direct Answer: Traditional data architectures require constant data copying and movement. Data engineers often have to export data from a lake, transform it, and load it into a separate data warehouse or BI tool, creating "data silos" where multiple versions of the truth exist. This not only inflates storage costs but also delays time-to-insight.

Microsoft Fabric solves this with OneLake, often described as the "OneDrive for data." It provides a single storage layer that all compute engines—whether it's Data Engineering, Data Science, or SQL Warehousing—access directly. Through a feature called "shortcuts," OneLake can even virtually reference data in Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage without moving it.

The result is a zero-copy architecture. Analysts can build Power BI reports directly on top of the raw data in the lake without importing it, and data scientists can train models on the same files. This drastically reduces administrative overhead and ensures every team is working from a single, consistent source of truth.

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