Power BI Architecture Choices for Azure Databricks (w/ Liping Huang)

LIVESTREAM DATE/TIME 📅

October 16th 2026 - 9:30 AM (Pacific Time)

DESCRIPTION 📄

Power BI gives you four main ways to report on data that lives in Azure Databricks: Direct Lake on OneLake, Direct Lake over mirrored Unity Catalog tables, DirectQuery against a Databricks SQL warehouse, and a composite model with import aggregations. Liping Huang wrote Microsoft's new white paper benchmarking all four side by side, and joins me to walk through the results.

The test runs the same TPC-DS data at roughly 26 million, 260 million and 2.6 billion rows, across cold, warm and hot cache, three filter scenarios and a 20-user load test. No pattern wins everywhere. Direct Lake holds up best for the warm and hot cache reports people open every day, queries that hit an aggregation table stay under 100ms at every volume, DirectQuery catches up (and sometimes wins) at 2.6 billion rows on an X-Large warehouse, and mirrored Unity Catalog tables slow down badly as the data grows.

GUEST BIO (NAME HERE) 👤

Liping Huang is the CEO of Data Leaps and a Data & AI Architect, blogger, YouTuber, keynote speaker and user group organizer (ex-Microsoft, ex-Databricks). Liping works with Tabular Editor as Field CTO for APAC and is passionate about helping Power BI users build better semantic models faster, creating content about Tabular Editor, Power BI, Fabric and Databricks on the Data Leaps YouTube channel and at dataleaps.co.uk.

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White Paper (PDF)
White Paper Announcement
Data Leaps
Data Leaps YouTube
Liping's LinkedIn

(Livestream Replay) Power BI Storage Modes in Microsoft Fabric - with Phil Seamark

DESCRIPTION 📄

A review of semantic model storage modes available today in Microsoft Fabric. In particular, let's look at the new Direct Lake storage mode and help understand how this compares with Import and Direct Query, and when you might use each.

GUEST BIO 👤

Phil works for Microsoft on the Fabric Customer Advisory Team (CAT) as a DAX and Data Modelling specialist.

As part of this role, he helps global enterprise customers to optimize and tune large data models to perform their best under heavy load.

Phil has over 30 years of experience in I.T. with most of that time building solutions in business intelligence and advanced analytics.

(Livestream Replay) Eliminate Data Silos with OneLake, the OneDrive for data - with Josh Caplan

DESCRIPTION 📄

OneLake eliminates pervasive and chaotic data silos created by developers configuring their own isolated storage. OneLake provides a single, unified storage system for all developers. Unifying data across an organization and clouds becomes trivial. With the OneLake data hub, users can easily explore and discover data to reuse, manage or gain insights. With business domains, different business units can work independently in a data mesh pattern, without the overhead of maintaining separate lakes. Tune in to learn more!

GUEST BIO 👤

Josh Caplan is a product management leader, currently leading Microsoft OneLake. Prior to his role at OneLake, Josh played a pivotal role in shaping the Power BI team, leading the development of developer experiences, Power BI Premium, SQL Server Analysis Services, and Azure Analysis Services. Josh also spent several years on the Bing team, where he leveraged his expertise in business intelligence to drive insights from Bing's massive data.

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OneLake Documentation
OneLake Explorer
OneLake Security

(Livestream Replay) DBT...What's That?!? Exploring the Data Build Tool in Fabric - with Johnny Winter 💀

DESCRIPTION 📄

Explore the powerful fusion of dbt (data build tool) with Microsoft Fabric. Discover how this integration allows you to transform your data using version controlled, documented, repeatable and testable patterns that you're able to deploy within Fabric's Synapse Data Warehousing. Learn practical use cases and best practices for leveraging dbt's capabilities, enhancing data reliability and driving more informed decision-making processes. For those wanting to follow along, you'll need access to a Fabric Data Warehouse, VS Code and a virtual python environment.

GUEST BIO 👤

Johnny currently works as a consultant for Advancing Analytics. He’s been working with Business Intelligence software since 2007, specialising in the Microsoft data platform since 2016. He’s a self-confessed Business Intelligence geek and in his spare time runs the website and YouTube channel Greyskull Analytics, where he likes to nerd out about all things Power BI.

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Website
LinkedIn