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webchris
Advocate III
Advocate III

Fabric - Row level security on Warehouse - effect on semantic models

Dear all, happy new year!

 

I have a question regarding the usage of semantic models which are based on a Fabric Warehouse (secured by Row Level Security through security functions):

 

- When I create such a semantic model, does it inherit the restrictions which are set in the Fabric Warehouse?
- My semantic model is supposed to be refreshed twice per day, and I wonder if and how it does know, that e.g. user "A" is allowed to see data for region "1", and user "B" is allowed to see data for region "2".

 

Thanks for feedback, have a great day!

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
fabricator1
Advocate II
Advocate II

According to this documentation, the Power BI semantic model will abide by the row level security of the data warehouse. Note that the Direct Lake will fall back to Direct Query mode when applying row level security to the Data Warehouse.
Row-level security in Fabric data warehousing - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

(However, if you create an import mode semantic model in Power BI Desktop based on data from the data warehouse, then it will ignore any RLS on the data warehouse and you will need to define RLS in Power BI Desktop.)

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3 REPLIES 3
AndyDDC
Super User
Super User

Happy new year to you @webchris 

 

are you Importing the data into the semantic model? If so, then once the data has been imported it won't know anything about the warehouse rls. You'd have to set that up in the semantic model 

fabricator1
Advocate II
Advocate II

According to this documentation, the Power BI semantic model will abide by the row level security of the data warehouse. Note that the Direct Lake will fall back to Direct Query mode when applying row level security to the Data Warehouse.
Row-level security in Fabric data warehousing - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn

(However, if you create an import mode semantic model in Power BI Desktop based on data from the data warehouse, then it will ignore any RLS on the data warehouse and you will need to define RLS in Power BI Desktop.)

Hi @fabricator1 

Many thanks, I did not really understand that point, but now it seems clear. I'll use the semantic model with direct query and see what I can get from it. 

Regards

Christian

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