Microsoft Fabric Integration

Overview

Microsoft Fabric is the unified analytics platform that includes Power BI, Data Factory, Data Engineering, Data Science, Real-Time Intelligence, and Data Warehouse. Power BI is deeply integrated as the visualization and semantic modeling layer of Fabric.

Direct Lake Mode

Direct Lake is a storage mode exclusive to Fabric that reads data directly from delta tables in OneLake without importing or sending DirectQuery requests.

How Direct Lake Works

1. Framing: On refresh, Direct Lake copies only metadata (Parquet file references) from delta tables -- takes seconds
2. On-demand loading: When a query hits the model, data is loaded from Parquet files directly into the VertiPaq engine
3. No data duplication: Unlike Import, no copy of data is stored in the semantic model
4. Near-import performance: Once loaded into memory, queries run at VertiPaq speed

Direct Lake vs Import vs DirectQuery