Christopher Schmidt lays out a use case:
Operational reporting and historical reporting serve distinct purposes in organizations. Historically, data teams have heavily leaned on providing historical reporting, as being able to report on the operational business processes has proved elusive.
As a result, organizations have created reports directly against the operational database for operational needs or spend significant effort trying to get analytical tools to refresh faster using ‘micro-batching’ and/or keeping a tool like Power BI in directQuery mode. These efforts come with the goal of ‘moving data through the system as fast as possible’.
Click through for an architecture diagram and an example scenario.