Creation of Direct Lake semantic models in Power BI Desktop

Power BI · General availability · Shipped

Power BI General availability Shipped
Last Modified: June 16, 2026 Release Date: Q3 2025

Description

Power BI is standardizing on open-data formats by adopting Delta Lake and Parquet to help you avoid vendor lock-in and reduce data duplication. This minimizes data silos and fragmentation, offering a single source of truth across the enterprise. Direct Lake accelerates time to data-driven decisions by unlocking incredible performance directly against OneLake, without the need to manage costly, time-consuming data refreshes for large volumes of data in OneLake.Create Direct Lake semantic models from Power BI Desktop from any OneLake source, not only Lakehouse or Warehouse. This feature allows users to build and maintain Power BI semantic models that query data directly from the lake, without depending on the SQL endpoint, enabling faster performance, simpler security management.

📰 Related Blog Article

Introducing Power BI Embedded with Direct Lake Mode
🔗 blog.fabric.microsoft.com

Change History

  1. 2026-06-16
    Restored to Roadmap
  2. 2026-06-16
    Removed from Roadmap
  3. 2025-09-24
    Release Date 2025-09-30 -> 2025-09-16 Release Status Planned -> Shipped
  4. 2025-08-28
    Roadmap Item Added
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