Microsoft Fabric interview questions
The Microsoft Fabric questions interviewers ask most, with short answers you can explain in your own words. Tap a question to see the answer.
01What is Microsoft Fabric?+
A SaaS analytics platform that brings data engineering, data factory, warehousing, real-time analytics and Power BI together on OneLake.
02What is OneLake?+
A single, tenant-wide data lake for all Fabric items, storing tables in Delta format.
03Lakehouse vs Warehouse in Fabric?+
A lakehouse stores files and Delta tables and is mainly worked on with Spark. A warehouse is a full T-SQL experience with multi-table transactions.
04What is the SQL analytics endpoint?+
A read-only T-SQL endpoint created for every lakehouse, so you can query its tables with SQL.
05What are shortcuts?+
Links to data in other locations (ADLS, S3, other lakehouses) without copying it.
06What is Direct Lake mode?+
Power BI reads Delta tables in OneLake directly, giving near import speed without scheduled refresh copies.
07What is V-Order?+
A write-time optimisation of Parquet files that makes reads faster for Fabric engines, especially Power BI.
08Dataflow Gen2 vs data pipelines?+
Dataflow Gen2 is low-code transformation with Power Query. Pipelines orchestrate activities like copy, notebooks and control flow.
09What is a Fabric capacity?+
The compute you buy (F SKUs) that all workspaces assigned to it share.
10How do notebooks fit in?+
Spark notebooks transform data in lakehouses with PySpark or Spark SQL, and can be scheduled or run from pipelines.
11What is the medallion architecture in Fabric?+
Bronze, silver and gold layers, often as separate lakehouses, with notebooks or dataflows moving data between them.
12What is Real-Time Intelligence?+
Fabric's streaming workload: eventstreams for ingestion, Eventhouse with KQL databases for storage and querying, and Activator for alerts.
13What is KQL?+
Kusto Query Language, used to query time-series and log data in Eventhouse.
14How is security handled?+
Workspace roles, item permissions, OneLake security, row and column level security in the warehouse and semantic models, and sensitivity labels.
15How do you do CI/CD in Fabric?+
Git integration for workspaces and deployment pipelines to promote items from dev to test to prod.
16How do you monitor Fabric?+
The Monitoring hub for runs and the Capacity Metrics app for capacity usage and throttling.
17How do you load data into the warehouse?+
COPY INTO, pipelines, dataflows, or cross-database queries from a lakehouse.
18What table maintenance is needed?+
OPTIMIZE to compact small files and VACUUM to remove old files on lakehouse Delta tables.
19What is the DP-700 exam?+
The Microsoft Fabric Data Engineer Associate certification exam, covering ingestion, transformation, security, monitoring and optimisation in Fabric.
20When would you choose Fabric?+
When the company already uses Power BI and Microsoft 365 and wants one platform with simple capacity-based pricing.
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Microsoft Fabric Data Engineer
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