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Direct Lake: Faster Power BI, No Refreshes, Seamless Fabric Integration

Ilgar_Zarbali's avatar
Ilgar_Zarbali
Icon for Super User rankSuper User
1 year ago
Traditional Data Processing in Power BI Before Direct Lake, Power BI had two main ways to process data: Direct Query – Queries data directly from the database in real-time. The advantage is that y...
Published 1 year ago
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Ilgar_Zarbali's avatar
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Joined September 15, 2020
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sgunasekhar1's avatar
sgunasekhar1
Regular Visitor
1 year ago

Ilgar_Zarbali Jalə Nazrin  DirectLake is definitely ground breaking feature for PowerBI report but has few shortcomings

Key Limitations & Considerations

Semantic Modeling Limitations:

  • You cannot add new calculated columns or calculated tables via DAX inside Direct Lake models—these must be created upstream in the lakehouse via Dataflow or other tools.

  • Composite models, hybrid tables, calculated tables referring to Direct Lake tables, and dual storage tables aren't supported within Direct Lake mode semantic models.

Security and View Limitations:

  • Works only with Delta tables stored in OneLake. Direct Lake does not support views—if you use SQL views, Power BI falls back to DirectQuery automatically.