Snowflake + Microsoft Fabric — Integration Patterns

Companion to Snowflake vs Microsoft - Comparison Reference
Hot topic at FabCon — they're not competitors anymore, they're converging.

How They Integrate

Open Mirroring (biggest one)

• Fabric's OneLake stores data in Delta Parquet format
• Snowflake announced Open Mirroring → Snowflake replicates tables directly into OneLake in near-real-time
• Power BI, Fabric notebooks, and other Fabric workloads can query Snowflake data without manual movement

Fabric Shortcuts → Snowflake

• Fabric Shortcuts create virtual links to external data sources
• Point a shortcut at Snowflake-managed storage (via ADLS Gen2 underneath)
• Query from Fabric Spark or SQL without a full copy

Azure Data Factory / Fabric Pipelines

• Fabric Pipelines (basically ADF) has a native Snowflake connector
• Bidirectional: Snowflake → OneLake or OneLake → Snowflake
• Common pattern: Snowflake as DWH, Fabric for BI/ML layer on top

Power BI DirectQuery

• Native Snowflake DirectQuery connector — been around for years
• Works inside Fabric today — semantic models can live query Snowflake
• No need to copy data into Fabric just for reporting

Notebooks / Spark

• Fabric Spark connects to Snowflake via the Snowflake Spark connector
• Read/write Snowflake tables from PySpark or Scala natively

Practical Architecture Pattern

Snowflake (DWH / source of truth)
        ↓  Open Mirroring / ADF Pipeline
     OneLake (Fabric)
        ↓
Power BI | Fabric Notebooks | Real-Time Analytics

The Reality

Snowflake and Fabric aren't mutually exclusive — plenty of orgs run both:

• Snowflake for the core data warehouse (cross-cloud, shared with partners)
• Fabric for the Microsoft BI/analytics/AI layer on top

The Open Mirroring announcement (2024) was a big deal — Microsoft acknowledging that customers aren't going to abandon Snowflake just because they bought Fabric licenses.

Related Sessions

• Sessions/If You're Not Using Open Mirroring Yet, You're Doing It the Hard Way
• Sessions/Unify your data estate across clouds and on-premises with Shortcuts and Mirrori
• Sessions/The Ultimate NO ETL Show Down - Shortcuts vs Mirroring vs Copy Job
• Sessions/Open interoperability - integrating Azure Databricks and OneLake
• Sessions/What's new in Mirroring SQL to Fabric- The Fast Track to Modern Data Integration & Analytics