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.

I’m sure you already know how to configure scheduled refresh for your semantic models in Power BI. While the options you have for controlling when refresh takes place are generally good enough – you ...

Some time ago I wrote a post about how you can use the DISCOVER_CALC_DEPENDENCY DMV to get a list of all the tables, columns and relationships referenced by a DAX query. That’s really useful and ...

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 ...

There’s a new M function in Power Query in Power BI that allows you to read the data from a Parquet file: Parquet.Metadata. It’s not documented yet and it’s currently marked as “intended for internal ...

If you’ve heard about the new Direct Lake mode for Power BI datasets in Fabric you’ll know that it gives you the query performance of Import mode (well, almost) without the need to actually import any ...

One frequently asked question I see asked on Power BI forums is whether it’s possible to run Power BI Desktop on a Mac or indeed anything other than a Windows PC. There are already a lot of detailed ...

In the second post in this series I discussed a KQL query that can be used to analyse Power BI refresh throughput at the partition level. However, if you remember back to the first post in this series ...

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 ...