Day 02 of 31 Days of SQL For Data Engineering: Building Your Lab
Part of Week 1: Foundations
Yesterday we saw why SQL still runs the modern data stack. Today we’ll roll up our sleeves and set up a free lab environment using Microsoft Fabric, an end‑to‑end analytics platform that blends data ingestion, transformation and visualisation services. The free trial gives you 60 days of access to all Fabric workloads with 64 capacity units (F64) and OneLake storage up to 1 TB. This is more than enough power to build labs for the entire course.
What You Get with the Fabric Free Trial
Microsoft Fabric combines several analytics “experiences” (Data Engineering, Data Factory, Data Science, Data Warehouse, Real‑Time Analytics and Power BI) under one unified workspace. The trial capacity includes:
Full access to almost all Fabric workloads (Spark notebooks, dataflows, pipelines, warehouses, dashboards).
64 capacity units (CU) – equivalent to a F64 capacity. Capacity units are how Fabric measures compute throughput.
OneLake storage up to 1 TB.
A Premium‑per‑User–like license – letting you create and share workspaces and collaborate with others.
A Power BI individual trial if you don’t already have one.
Some advanced features like Copilot, trusted workspace access and private link are disabled, but everything you need for this course is available.
Step 1 – Sign Up for the Free Trial
Starting a trial is easy and doesn’t require a credit card. You have several options, but the account manager method makes you the Capacity administrator and gives you control over who can use the trial.
Create or sign in with a free account. Go to the Fabric app and sign in with your Microsoft account. Existing Power BI users can use their current login.
Open the Account Manager. Click your profile photo in the upper‑right corner. In the Account Manager pane, click Start trial. If you see “Trial status” instead, you may already have a trial or a Power BI free license.
Accept the terms and pick a region. A prompt asks you to activate the 60‑day trial. You can keep the default region or choose another. Choose carefully changing the region later requires deleting your Fabric items. Accept the terms, then click Activate.
Confirmation and countdown. After a moment you’ll see a confirmation message; click Fabric Home Page to start exploring. The top menu shows a countdown of days remaining. The Account Manager also displays “Trial status” with the remaining days.
Step 2 – Understand Your Trial Capacity
During the trial, you’re the capacity admin. Your trial includes a single F64 capacity with 64 capacity units. Capacity units measure CPU and memory resources; 64 CUs provide enough throughput to run notebooks, pipelines and dashboards concurrently.
You can check your remaining days anytime by reopening the Account Manager; it displays the trial status and countdown.
Step 3 – Create Your Lab Workspace
Workspaces are folders that organise Fabric items such as SQL warehouses, notebooks and reports. For this course we recommend creating a dedicated workspace for each week or project.
To create a workspace:
In the left navigation pane, select Workspaces.
At the bottom of the fly‑out pane, click New workspace.
Give the workspace a unique name. Optionally add a description and assign it to a domain.
Click Apply or proceed to Advanced settings if you need to configure a contact list, license mode or storage options.
By default, new workspaces are created on your trial capacity. If you later purchase a paid capacity, you can assign the workspace to that capacity.
Step 4 – Share the Trial with Team‑Mates (Optional)
You can invite colleagues to collaborate on your lab. As capacity admin, you can:
Enable Contributor permissions from Settings → Admin portal → Trial, allowing others to assign their workspaces to your trial capacity.
Assign multiple workspaces to the trial. Anyone with access to a workspace inherits the trial rights.
This is useful if you’re learning as a team or want to explore Fabric with colleagues.
Step 5 – Start Experimenting
Now that your trial is active and your lab workspace is created, you can explore Fabric’s experiences:
Try a Spark notebook in the Data Engineering experience. It allows you to write notebooks using Python or SQL on an auto‑scaling cluster.
Build a Warehouse or Lakehouse and query data using T‑SQL. Each user gets 64 CUs, so you can run queries and ETL workloads without worrying about charges.
Create a Dataflow or Pipeline in the Data Factory experience to orchestrate data movement.
Build a simple Power BI report to visualise results; the trial includes a Power BI individual trial.
Best Practices and Gotchas
Choose your region wisely. Data is stored in the region you select when activating the trial. Changing regions later requires deleting and recreating items.
Watch your time. The trial lasts 60 days. The countdown in the menu helps you track your remaining days.
Check limitations. Some features such as Copilot, private link and trusted workspace access are not available on trial capacities.
Power BI license required. If you’re new to Power BI, the trial automatically gives you an individual license; existing users might need to activate a free Power BI license before starting the Fabric trial.
What’s Next?
With your Fabric lab ready, you’re set to begin exploring SQL on a modern platform. Tomorrow we’ll dive into tables, schemas and data types and run our first T‑SQL queries. For now, explore the interface, pin your workspace for quick access, and familiarise yourself with the navigation.
See you on Day 3!