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MICROSOFT FABRICTechnology

Microsoft Fabric Warehouse: Adaptive Liquid Clustering Cuts Compute 83%

Client
Enterprise Analytics Program
Industry
Technology
Duration
5 months
83%
Lower compute consumption
97%
Less data scanned
60–70%
Analytics performance gain
F64→F32
Capacity right-sized
The Challenge

Where things stood before

Fabric Warehouse queries were scanning terabytes for every dashboard refresh. Analysts abandoned reports mid-run and compute credits were burning through the F64 capacity daily.

Our Approach

How we engineered the outcome

  • Profiled top-50 Warehouse queries via Fabric Capacity Metrics and identified clustering gaps.
  • Rolled out adaptive Liquid Clustering on high-cardinality join keys.
  • Added incremental statistics collection and predicate pushdown across gold-layer tables.
  • Refactored PySpark transformations with skew handling and broadcast tuning.
  • Migrated legacy T-SQL transforms to dbt-fabric models with tests and docs.
The Outcomes

Measurable business impact

83%

Lower compute consumption

97%

Less data scanned

60–70%

Analytics performance gain

F64→F32

Capacity right-sized

Architecture Diagram

Reference Architecture

The reference architecture we deployed for this engagement, layer by layer.

Sources
  • ADF pipelines
  • ADLS Gen2
Ingest
  • Dataflows Gen2
  • ADF Copy Activity
Lakehouse
  • Fabric OneLake
  • Delta w/ Liquid Clustering
Warehouse
  • Fabric Warehouse (T-SQL)
  • dbt-fabric transformations
Serve
  • Power BI Direct Lake
  • Semantic Models
Before / After

The transformation, in numbers

Before
Compute capacityF64 · saturated
Data scanned/queryTB-scale
Analyst waitMulti-hour
ClusteringNone
After
Compute capacityF32 · headroom
Data scanned/query-97%
Analyst waitSub-minute
ClusteringAdaptive Liquid