Gerhard Brueckl explains how Power BI can act as a data virtualization engine:
But lets examine what we currently have in Power BI:
– a semantic layer and data modelling capabilities
– access to various data sources via Direct Query (remember, we do not want to load any data!)
– ability to combine data from those sourcesThe last part is the most important one here and you may wonder what I am talking about. And you are right, by default a DQ model is only linked to one data source at a time but you can add other data sources manually in the Power Query editor!
This is where it get’s interesting and what this blog post is about.
Read the whole thing.