The Fabric Lakehouse is where Microsoft has put serious architectural investment. For teams new to it, the first project can feel like everything is available and nothing is clear.
Start with one domain
The most common mistake: scope. Teams want to migrate everything. Start with one business domain — sales, HR, project financials — define it clearly, and deliver it completely before expanding.
The medallion architecture
- Bronze: raw data as it arrives, no transformation, append-only
- Silver: cleaned and standardised — type corrections, null handling, deduplication
- Gold: analytics-ready — aggregations, business metrics, what Power BI reports from
Start with this pattern even on simple projects. Building the habit from the start saves significant rework later.
Notebooks vs Data Factory pipelines
Team comfortable with Python/Spark → Notebooks. Team more comfortable with visual tools → Fabric pipelines. You can use both in the same project.
The goal of your first Fabric project should be to deliver a working, governed, end-to-end data pipeline that your stakeholders trust — not to use every feature.
Give yourself twelve weeks for a well-scoped first Fabric project: four weeks design and setup, four weeks build and test, four weeks validation and handover.
