Chris Webb - Fabric Direct Lake Deep Dive

One of the coolest things about Microsoft Fabric is the new Power BI Direct Lake mode, where you can build reports on data in your data lake without needing to import it. In this session you'll learn all about Direct Lake mode: how it works, why you might not get it to work, how to monitor it and more!
Speaker Details - Chris Webb
Specialist in Fabric, Power BI, Analysis Services, MDX, Power Pivot, DAX, and Power Query. Chris been blogging about Microsoft BI for over 10 years, and racked up over 1500 posts here! He also speaks at a number of conferences including SQLBits, the PASS Summit, the PASS BA Conference, SQL Saturdays and user groups.

[@Milhouse77BS]

26:14 killer Direct Lake feature is reuse of dimensions with shortcuts.

[@vamsikrishna254]

Fabulous information ❤it . This is what I am looking for. Thanks for the treasure.

[@Milhouse77BS]

46:06 so we can control when the new data is available to Direct Lake so data consistent. Such as both Sales and Inventory data changing at the same time.

[@Tom-kp2lv]

Thank you! Great vid, very helpful! BUT, those limitations are total show stoppers. I'm looking forward to when fabric matures, but it sure doesn't seem ready for prime time yet. And it seems that the "guard rails" are likely to be serious limitations. You mention row limitations, but what about width? Also, I hope there is a plan to develop a path for translating PBIs in desktop to use this. If I have to rebuild all of my models from scratch, that is another block. What I don't understand is where all of the data modeling that I currently do in azure sql would happen in this new world? I hope this evolves to be usable - conceptually it's great. But for now, it doesn't appear to be a viable option for real world use - yet!

[@ws3457]

I think the idea is that you do your data modeling in Power Bi as a semantic model for Fabric.

[@Tom-kp2lv]

@@ws3457 Yeah there's no way I could efficiently do the extensive modeling required to create a star schema in pbi. That needs to happen earlier in the chain of events (upstream), as per Roche's Maixm!

[@ws3457]

@@Tom-kp2lvThat it does!