A good user experience that is simple, agile and frictionless is key to driving people’s adoption of new technologies. In that sense, OneLake Explorer, the search engine integrated with Microsoft Fabric‘s DataLake, takes data analysis to an unprecedented level.
For users, navigating through data is effortless. As much as it is for a person using Microsoft 365 to access the latest version of a document via OneDrive. No hassle. No need to know the underlying technology. No conflicts linked to formats or data type. In this level of simplicity lies much of its power.
Why is Microsoft Fabric different from the rest?

Before we get into OneLake’s scanning feature, let’s focus on understanding what makes Microsoft Fabric different.
This solution from Microsoft, Nubiral’s business partner, is a powerful, innovative and different tool to everything we have known so far. It is also powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
Goodbye to subsystems: A complete and integrated platform
The main differentiation of Microsoft Fabric is in its proposal. It is a unified, end-to-end analytics platform. This means that all the data and analytics tools an organization needs are brought together here. And they work in a transparent, agile and collaborative way.
No more need for multiple subsystems to support different analytics projects. One product, one experience, one architecture, one vendor.
In addition, the experience is presented as software as a service. So users can sign up seamlessly and start getting value from the solution in just a few minutes.
Hello to the data lake: Data Lake-centric solution
The other major differentiating value of Microsoft Fabric that we will focus on in the next sections, is the fact that it is Data Lake-centric.
Data lakes are essential for getting the most value out of data and moving forward with AI initiatives.
But they are not always a simple architecture: they are often messy and complicated. They are often a real headache to create, integrate, manage and operate.
Even when they are operational, complex situations often arise. These include data overlaps, vendor lock-in or conflicts between multiple data products using different formats in the same lake. Microsoft Fabric solves this with its OneLake approach.
OneLake: Putting data to work
We said at the beginning of the article that OneLake can be considered the OneDrive of data. This multi-cloud SaaS data lake is integrated and automatically available to all users.
The comparison refers to the fact that all Fabric workloads are automatically connected to OneLake. That is, in the same way that all Microsoft 365 applications connect to OneDrive.
Data is organized in an intuitive data center and indexed automatically. And, of course, all users can use it for discovery, sharing, governance and compliance.
It doesn’t matter if they are a developer, a data expert or a business user. Everyone can take advantage of this benefit equally. In addition, thanks to the “shortcuts”, it is possible to share data between users and applications without moving or duplicating information.
At the same time, data storage and isolated storage accounts that lead to chaos and poor data quality are avoided.
One Lake Explorer: The file explorer
To go a step further in terms of simplification, the OneLake Explorer file explorer application integrates OneLake with Windows File Explorer.
In this way, all OneLake items that the user has access to in Windows File Explorer are automatically synchronized.
This makes it possible to extract updated metadata into files and folders and send the changes made locally to the OneLake service. Synchronization does not download data or creates any placeholders.
Conclusions
The essence of Microsoft Fabric is to enable organizations to extract the maximum possible value from their data. And, at the same time, to drive AI initiatives within enterprises.
With that in mind, it promotes a unified, simple solution that empowers users to generate results in a few minutes.
With its OneLake data lake, plus features such as OneLake Explorer, it ensures a smooth, efficient and error-free experience, similar to that achieved with basic applications.
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