Lab 1: The Modern Lakehouse
Your Ascend trial Instance is configured with Ascend-Managed Microsoft Fabric as its Data Plane — the storage and compute layer that processes and persists your data. This means you can start building and running data pipelines immediately without any infrastructure setup.
When you're ready to connect Ascend to your own lakehouse or warehouse, see the Getting Started guides for a guide to connecting your own data plane.
Get started with OneLake on Microsoft
OneLake is Microsoft’s single logical data lake for your whole organization, built into Microsoft Fabric. You work with data through Fabric experiences (lakehouses, warehouses, notebooks, pipelines) while OneLake stores files and tables in Delta format on Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 under the hood.
Quick path to a first lakehouse
- Start Fabric — Sign in at app.fabric.microsoft.com with a work or school account. If you don’t have capacity yet, start a Microsoft Fabric trial (free capacity for learning).
- Create a workspace — In Fabric, create a workspace where you’ll host lakehouse items. Assign it to a Fabric capacity (trial or paid).
- Create a lakehouse — In the workspace, Create → Lakehouse. Name it (e.g.
bootcamp_lakehouse). This provisions storage and a SQL analytics endpoint backed by OneLake. - Load or explore data — Use Get data, Data pipelines, or Notebooks to ingest files or tables. Data lands in OneLake as managed tables (Delta) or files under your lakehouse’s Files / Tables areas.
- Learn the concepts — Read Microsoft’s overview of how OneLake unifies storage and how lakehouses combine with warehouses:
Documentation hub
- Microsoft Fabric documentation — Home for lakehouses, OneLake, data engineering, and integration patterns.
Questions?
Reach out to your bootcamp instructors or support@ascend.io.