Shared vocabulary
Architect glossary
Terms from the GeekInData content world: Direct Lake, Medallion, Microsoft Foundry, Entra ID, MLVs, white-label shells, and the failure modes that show up in reviews. Short definitions, then links to the notes that earn them.
Definitions
Direct Lake
Direct Lake is a semantic model storage mode that queries parquet/Delta in OneLake instead of importing a copy into VertiPaq. It wins when facts are large and freshness matters, and it fails loudly when the lake contract drifts from what the model expects.
Medallion
Medallion is a meaning contract: bronze lands raw or near-raw, silver cleans and conforms, gold serves products. Lakehouses, schemas, and warehouses are packaging. Choose packaging your CI/CD and ownership model can survive.
OneLake
OneLake is the shared storage plane for Fabric items. Shortcuts, lakehouses, and warehouses all sit on it. Treating OneLake as a second place to copy the same gold is usually a design smell.
Microsoft Foundry
Microsoft Foundry is the platform name for the agent catalog, model hosting, and related control plane behind many enterprise agent apps on this site. Prefer this product name over legacy Azure AI Foundry branding in GeekInData notes.
Entra ID
Microsoft Entra ID answers who may sign in and which app roles or groups they carry. For agent apps, Entra is the shell gate. Agent catalog and knowledge entitlements still need an API authorization story on top.
Materialized Lake View (MLV)
Materialized Lake Views turn declarative SQL into durable lake artifacts with refresh semantics. They are useful for SCD2 history, typed silver contracts, and cases where a view alone is too fragile for Direct Lake or warehouse consumers.
White-label shell
A white-label AgentWebApp core keeps a stable application root and deploy templates, then leaves overlay slots for tenant identity, branding, and feature toggles. Customer identifiers stay out of the shared core on purpose.
Agent front door
An agent front door is the product surface in front of Microsoft Foundry agents: sign-in, catalog filtering, chat streaming, and knowledge browse. It is not the agent runtime itself. Confusing the two collapses auth and network decisions.
Lakehouse
A Fabric lakehouse packages OneLake folders, Delta tables, and often a SQL endpoint. Topology choices (one lakehouse with schemas versus many lakehouses) should follow blast radius and ownership, not workshop aesthetics.
Shortcut
Shortcuts reference existing OneLake or external paths without a second physical copy. Shortcuts-only bronze is a deliberate pattern: land a contract and clean views, not another warehouse of duplicated gold.
Semantic model
A semantic model is the product contract for analytics: tables, relationships, captions, and refresh behavior. Gold tables without an explicit semantic contract are just another landing zone.
App access
App access is the presence gate: Entra assignment, Conditional Access, network rules. It proves someone may enter the building. It does not decide which agents or knowledge paths they can use.
Agent access
Agent access is authorization and scope on the resource API: which agents appear, which chat streams are allowed, which knowledge paths exist. Enforce with app roles or equivalent claims on every sensitive call.
Private endpoint
Private endpoints move App Service, storage, and related PaaS onto private DNS and VNet integration. Public PoC ingress is not an MVP control plane. Treat networking as architecture, not an env flag.
Fabric CI/CD blast radius
Fabric deployment paths can republish unchanged notebooks and widen blast radius. Design for stable identities, smaller packages, and honest change detection so empty diffs stay empty in production.
Genie readiness
Genie readiness is a modeling problem: naming, relationships, descriptions, and governed context. Prompt tricks will not rescue a messy semantic surface.