Forum Discussion
difference between gold copy and warehouse
hi , as i get further into fabric i see "warehouse" referenced as if its a unique product within fabric. But as i read about the medallion pattern, i get the sense its (gold copy) a warehouse. whats the difference?
Gold layer and Warehouse are different things that often get mixed up. Gold is a concept from the medallion pattern. It just means business ready, well modeled data, regardless of where it lives. Warehouse is a specific Fabric item, a T-SQL engine that supports full INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and MERGE on Delta tables in OneLake, plus a strict schema.
You can put your gold layer in either a Lakehouse or a Warehouse. The choice depends on how you build it: if your transformations are Spark or notebook first, Lakehouse is usually easier; if your team is T-SQL first and you want true DML and stored procedures, Warehouse fits better. Both surface the data as Delta in OneLake, so downstream Power BI Direct Lake and shortcuts work the same way.
If this answered your question, please give it a kudos and mark it as the accepted solution.
Thanks,
Shai Karmani
2 Replies
Gold layer and Warehouse are different things that often get mixed up. Gold is a concept from the medallion pattern. It just means business ready, well modeled data, regardless of where it lives. Warehouse is a specific Fabric item, a T-SQL engine that supports full INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE and MERGE on Delta tables in OneLake, plus a strict schema.
You can put your gold layer in either a Lakehouse or a Warehouse. The choice depends on how you build it: if your transformations are Spark or notebook first, Lakehouse is usually easier; if your team is T-SQL first and you want true DML and stored procedures, Warehouse fits better. Both surface the data as Delta in OneLake, so downstream Power BI Direct Lake and shortcuts work the same way.
If this answered your question, please give it a kudos and mark it as the accepted solution.
Thanks,
Shai KarmaniHi db042190
The reason they often talk about gold and warehouse together is because as mentioned before, it is your business ready data, but using the warehouse means there's a lot less things for you to. Manage and maintain with example, in a lake house, you've got to optimize and vacuum the lake house in order to keep it intact while these things are automatically managed within a warehouse.
