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DP-900 · 4 Describe an analytics workload

Fabric and Azure Databricks

Exam objective: Describe Microsoft cloud services for large-scale analytics, including Azure Databricks and Microsoft Fabric

Microsoft Fabric is a unified SaaS workspace built around one shared lake, OneLake. Azure Databricks is a Spark platform that runs inside your own subscription.

Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks both do large scale analytics, but they package the work differently.

Fabric is a single software as a service workspace. Every workload, from pipelines to reports, reads and writes the same tenant wide lake, OneLake, stored in the open Delta Lake format. Inside a Fabric workspace, a Lakehouse holds files plus a SQL endpoint, a Warehouse is a SQL Server compatible relational store, Data Factory builds and schedules ingestion pipelines, and Power BI turns the result into reports.

Azure Databricks runs as a managed service inside your own Azure subscription and is built on Apache Spark. Its Lakehouse layer, also backed by Delta Lake, supports SQL analytics and machine learning side by side. Databricks SQL is a serverless warehouse for BI style queries, Notebooks give you a collaborative, multi language coding environment, and Unity Catalog governs access, lineage and discovery across the workspace.

The two are not mutually exclusive: a solution can land data in a lake, use a Databricks notebook to process a large volume of it with Spark, and then load the results into a Fabric Warehouse for reporting.

Both platforms add an AI assistant for natural language queries: Copilot in Fabric, Genie in Databricks.

On the exam, OneLake and a single SaaS workspace point to Fabric, while a subscription hosted Spark service with Unity Catalog points to Databricks.

Key points

  • Microsoft Fabric is a unified SaaS workspace in which every workload shares one tenant wide lake, OneLake, in Delta Lake format.
  • Azure Databricks is a Spark based platform that runs inside your own Azure subscription, also using Delta Lake.
  • Fabric packages a Lakehouse, a Warehouse, Data Factory and Power BI into one workspace.
  • Databricks SQL offers a serverless SQL warehouse, and Unity Catalog governs access, lineage and discovery.
  • The two platforms can be combined in one solution, for example processing data in Databricks before loading it into a Fabric Warehouse.

Exam trap

Unity Catalog is a Databricks governance layer, not a Fabric component. A question that names a specific governance feature is testing whether you know which platform it belongs to.

Check yourself

For each statement about Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks, select Yes if it is true. Otherwise, select No.

  • Microsoft Fabric and Azure Databricks both use Delta Lake as a native storage format.
  • Azure Databricks stores all of its data in OneLake.
  • Fabric Warehouse is a SQL Server-compatible relational data warehouse backed by OneLake.
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Checked against Microsoft Learn on October 1, 2026.

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