Direct Lake mode in Power BI allows you to build semantic models on very large volumes of data, but because it is still an in-memory database engine there are limits on how much data it can work with.

The recent announcement of Surge Protection gives Fabric/Power BI capacity admins a way to restrict the impact of background operations on a capacity, preventing them from causing throttling. However, ...

Everyone is excited about Power BI Copilot, and the newly-announced preview of being able to use Copilot to ask questions about all the data in your semantic model rather than just what is shown in a ...

You probably know that semantic models in Power BI can use a fixed amount of memory. This is true of all types of semantic model – Import, Direct Lake and DirectQuery – but it’s not something you ...

The more you monitor something the more likely it is that you’ll see something strange you can’t explain. This is true of several customers I’ve spoken to recently who saw DAX queries run in the ...

For any Power BI person, Direct Lake mode is the killer feature of Fabric. Import mode report performance (or near enough) direct on data from the lake, with none of the waiting around for data to ...

Here’s a recording of a session I did for the Manchester (UK) Power BI user group recently on best practices for DirectQuery mode in Power BI: I’ve done it for a few other groups over the last six ...

Recently we announced an important new optimisation for DirectQuery datasets: the ability to run (some) of the queries generated by a single DAX query in parallel. You can read the blog post here: A ...

In the blog post for the October 2022 release of Power BI Desktop there’s a brief description of a new optimisation in Power BI for filters that perform searches in text columns. In this blog post I’m ...

The new DAX window functions (announced here, more details on Jeffrey Wang’s blog here and here) have generated a lot of excitement already – they are extremely powerful. However one important benefit ...

In part 1 of this series I showed how you could create a very simple custom connector for Power Automate that allows you to call the Power BI Enhanced Refresh API. However, I didn’t show what I think ...