Forum Discussion

ipkus's avatar
ipkus
Icon for Advocate I rankAdvocate I
2 months ago
Solved

When to Choose Views vs. Materialized Lake Views

This is a question that comes up often as teams start designing their Fabric architecture. The decision looks simple, but it can directly impact Power BI performance, Direct Lake vs. DirectQuery, dat...
data engineering
  • ipkus's avatar
    ipkus
    1 month ago

    Thanks for your inputs. What I really love with Fabric is we have pretty solid choices based on Architectural choices, whether we want to proactively have Fabric do work in case of MLV or do the work in real time in case of views. The solution depends on what direction works for our use case.

v-kathullac's avatar
v-kathullac
Icon for Community Support rankCommunity Support
1 month ago

Hi ipkus​ ,

I agree that row count should not be the sole factor in deciding between MLV and virtual transformations. The recommended approach is to first determine where the processing should happen based on the workload.

  • Use MLV/materialization when transformations are complex, data is consumed frequently, or query performance and concurrency are key requirements.
  • Use virtual transformations when data freshness is the priority and the transformation logic can reasonably be processed at query time.
  • Consider transformation complexity, freshness requirements, query patterns, concurrency, performance, storage/compute cost, and maintainability.
  • For a federated Fabric environment, these should be treated as guidelines rather than fixed rules based on row count.
  • If both approaches are feasible, perform a workload-based performance test and choose the option that provides the best balance of performance, freshness, and operational simplicity.

Therefore, the final recommendation is to choose the architecture based on workload and business requirements, not row count alone.

Thanks,

Chaithanya.