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A Primer on Direct Lake

Ginger Grant talks about a Fabric feature not in Power BI or Synapse:

With the general availability release of Fabric in November 2023, I am dedicating several posts to the features that are only in Fabric and not anywhere else. The first feature is Direct Lake. Direct Lake was created to address problems with Power BI Direct Query. Anyone who has used Direct Query knows what I am talking about. If you have implemented Direct Query, I am guessing you have run into one or all of these problems, including managing the constant hits to the source database which increase with the more users you have, user complaints about slow visuals, or the need to put apply buttons on all of your visuals to help with speed. Direct Query is a great idea. Who wants to import a bunch of data into Power BI? Directly connecting to the database sounds like a better idea, until you learn that that the data goes from Power BI to the database then back for each user one at a time, which means that Power BI must send more queries the more people are accessing reports. Users want to be able to access data quickly, have it scale well, and have access to the latest data.

Click through to learn more about Direct Lake.