Direct Lake mode and "Report Specific" tables

[Scott_Powell]

Hi, I've run into an issue with direct lake mode and semantic models that I'm not sure how to solve. We have an enterprise warehouse in Fabric and build "enterprise data models" using direct lake mode against it.

But we also have a ton of reporting requirements where the report writers need some sort of special "grouper table" - lists of things like diagnoses, departments, physicians, patients, etc. I don't want these grouper tables cluttering up the main enterprise warehouse - I want to keep that tidy so people using it don't have to ignore 500 specialty report tables to get to the 50 "true" DW tables.

But direct lake mode semantic models only support coming from a single lakehouse / warehouse. We had thought to put all these report specific tables into a separate warehouse to keep the main one clean, but that doesn't seem to be an option. Does anyone have any easy, clean ideas on how to solve this?

Ideas I've had but not super fond of:

1. A separate schema within the main warehouse for these

Pros: everything in the same warehouse so no issues with including in a semantic model

Cons: I really don't want to give a bunch of report writers the ability to drop and create tables in the warehouse

2. Create a separate lakehouse or warehouse for the report specific tables, then use a lakehouse to shortcut the main DW and the report specific tables together

Pros: Works fine in theory

Cons: Have to build a new lakehouse for each and every report

Thanks,

Scott

[Anonymous]

Hi Scott_Powell ,

Perhaps you can use data flows to bring data in from the warehouse and transform it into the specific structures needed for a report.

Creating a dataflow - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

[Scott_Powell]

Hi @Anonymous - my question isn't "how to create the tables" but more where do I put them? I really don't want to clutter the main warehouse with them, but the limits of direct lake seem to force me to do that. Just trying to find alternatives that let me keep the main warehouse "clean" but still have a place to land report specific tables that don't belong there.

Thanks!

Scott

[Anonymous]

Hi @Scott_Powell ,

Sorry, I haven't found any articles that meet your needs. Some articles say that you can use external storage 'Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2', but I have no relevant experience. I hope others can give you an effective solution.