On Semantic Model: Dataflow vs Direct Connection to the Warehouse – Which Do You Prefer and Why?

Hi RonaldBalza-943,

Thank you for reaching out to Microsoft Fabric Community.

It is completely based on the data and your requirement:

Use Direct Connection if you are working with a structured fabric Warehouse, and your data is already clean and ready for modeling and you need the best performance especially for large datasets, then building your semantic model directly on the warehouse is the best approach.

Use the Dataflow’s if you need to perform any custom ETL transformations using power query, and if you are working with the data from multiple sources and if you want to reuse transformation logic across models.

So if your warehouse is your primary and trusted data source, I would recommend creating your semantic model directly on the warehouse. So that you get improved performance and data freshness especially when used with Direct Lake.

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Thanks and regards,

Anjan Kumar Chippa