Month: March 2024

Microsoft BI Platform

Power BI Direct Lake and DirectQuery in the Age of Fabric

Paul Turley

I just returned from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference in Las Vegas. Over 4,000 attendees saw a lot of demos showing how to effortlessly build a modern data platform with petabytes of data in One Lake, and then ask CoPilot to generate beautiful Power BI reports from semantic models that magically appear from data in a Fabric Lakehouse. Is Direct Lake the silver bullet solution that will finally deliver incredibly fast analytic reporting over huge volumes of data in any form, in real time? Will Direct Lake models replace Import model and solve the dreaded DirectQuery mode performance problems of the past? The answer is No, but Direct Lake can break some barriers. This post is a continuation of my previous post titled “Moving from Power BI to Microsoft fabric”.

Direct Lake is a new semantic model storage mode introduced in Microsoft Fabric, available to enterprise customers using Power BI Premium and Fabric capacities. It is an extension of the Analysis Services Vertipaq in-memory analytic engine that reads data directly from the Delta-parquet structured storage files in a Fabric lakehouse or warehouse.

Microsoft BI Platform

Moving from Power BI to Microsoft Fabric

Paul Turley

Fabric is here but what does that mean if you are using Power BI? What do you need to know and what, if anything will you need to change if you are a Power BI report designer, developer or BI solution architect? What parts of Fabric should you use now and how do you plan for the near-term future? As I write this in March of 2024, I’m at the Microsoft MVP Summit at the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Washington this week learning about what the product teams will be working on over the next year or so. Fabric is center stage in every conversation and session. To say that Fabric has moved my cheese would be a gross understatement. I’ve been working with data and reporting solutions for about 30 years and have seen many products come and go. Everything I knew about working with databases, data warehouses, transforming and reporting on data has changed recently BUT it doesn’t mean that everyone using Power BI must stop what they are doing and adapt to these changes. The core product is unchanged. Power BI still works as it always has.

The introduction of Microsoft Fabric in various preview releases over the past two years have immersed me into the world of Spark, Python, parquet-Delta storage, lakehouses and medallion data warehouse architectures. These technologies, significantly different from the SQL Server suite of products I’ve known and loved for the past twenty years, represent a major shift in direction, forming the backbone of OneLake; Microsoft’s universal integrated data platform that hosts all the components comprising Fabric. They built all of Fabric on top of the existing Power BI service, so all of the data workloads live inside familiar workspaces, accessible through the Power BI web-based portal (now called the Fabric portal).