Run Microsoft Fabric on a Laptop!

With Fabric trials finally ending; mine lasted for over 3 years, I figured that people might want a free way to play around with Fabric-esque technologies like lake houses, DirectLake, etc. Except; you know, stuff that actually works.

I did some searching around and came across some articles like this one about Building a Lightweight Data Lakehouse for Free: A Guide to DuckDB, Apache Iceberg, and dbt v2. Except, that article doesn’t have any actual directions. In fact, none of the articles I found seemed to have any step-by-step directions. All the articles are basically, “Hey, these are the technologies you should use.”. Not really super helpful. So I figured I would sit down and write one and this article is the result.

What this article covers is how to create a working demo environment consisting of a lake house and a report that directly queries the parquet files in the lake house via a SQL endpoint. That’s effectively how DirectLake works in Microsoft Fabric.

The first thing you are going to need is Docker Desktop. You can download it here. Next is git. You should already have winget installed on Windows 10 and 11. Use it to download and install git with the following command in a PowerShell session:

winget install --id Git.Git -e -source winget