ArchitectureArchitecture StandardUpdated: December 2025
10 min read·Audience: Chief Data Officers
Key Architectural Takeaways
Decentralize data ownership into business domains while maintaining platform security policies.
Publish versioned data product contracts with explicit freshness and SLA guarantees.
Use OneLake zero-copy shortcuts to share Gold products without creating redundant ETL copies.
Standardize common dimension keys (Customer, Calendar) across all domain workspaces.
01
Domain Ownership & Data Product Contracts
Data Mesh in Fabric decentralizes data ownership to business domains (e.g. Sales, Finance, Supply Chain) while maintaining central platform guardrails. Each domain builds, owns, and operates its data products within dedicated Fabric Domains, exposing curated Gold tables and semantic models as versioned data products.
Implementation & Verification Checklist
4 Verification Checks- Define domain boundaries and assign accountable business/technical domain owners
- Publish explicit data product SLA contracts, update frequencies, and schema definitions
- Expose Gold data products via OneLake zero-copy shortcuts to downstream consuming domains
- Enforce central security, networking, and compliance guardrails across all domain workspaces
02
Federated Cataloging & Interoperability
Enable cross-domain data discovery using Microsoft Purview Hub and Fabric domain cataloging. Ensure consuming domains access data through read-only OneLake shortcuts, eliminating redundant ETL copying while enforcing source domain security policies.
Implementation & Verification Checklist
3 Verification Checks- Register all domain data products in the Purview data catalog
- Standardize common dimension keys (e.g. Customer ID, Date dimension) across domains
- Monitor cross-domain OneLake shortcut access and compute consumption