Power BI Direct Lake and DirectQuery in the Age of Fabric
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.