Forum Discussion
Advocate IIIDataflow Gen1 officially marked as Legacy today — Pro users left with no migration path unless they
Advocate IITo call Gen2 an upgrade over "Gen1," it would have to be able to do what Gen1 can do, and it CAN'T. Gen1 can bring data from your source and apply transformations 1x and make that data available to any semantic model that needs that data - without adding extra cost. If Gen 2 had an option to "retain" the data - instead of having to send it somewhere, then I would love Gen2 and say you can lose Gen1 next week... no problem.
There is a real cost management issue here. I see clients at present where costs are spiralling and Gen2 is often at the heart of it because people do not know how to use them - Power BI is supposed to allow the business to do a lot - Gen1 was a cost neutral way of working that if they did something wrong or made a mistake the worst that would happen is the dataflow failed. Yes we can isolate workspaces and throttle areas but we should not be using a preium tier for development tasks.
For SME's the cost of bringing in Fabric is significant, especially on day 1 of wondering what Power BI will be able to do for them.
This change hits every level of Microsoft's customer base. The only reason to do it is to increase profits; it does not benefit your customer base.
- lbendlin
Super User
It is possible to run a DF Gen2 without a destination. That would make it "equivalent" to a DF Gen1 with the difference that DFGen1 stores CSV files in Azure Blob storage and DF Gen2 stores Delta Lake files in OneLake (i think)
- Jon_vB
So, it's just a matter of letting me create a Gen2 flow as 'just' a Pro user, no fabric license needed. That seems like something they could have sorted out before announcing Gen1 is being retired. I still think getting organizations started that way will eventually lead them to want a data warehouse, but it's nice to have the ability to reuse right from the start.
