Everything You Need to Know About the New Power BI Storage Mode

Direct Lake is a new Power BI storage mode in Microsoft Fabric designed to offer performance similar to Import mode without data duplication or latency. It works by directly querying delta tables stored in OneLake. The process of keeping the semantic model synchronized with the latest data is called "framing," which is a metadata-only refresh rather than a full data import. This framing process points the model to the latest version of the delta files and can be configured to occur automatically or require a manual trigger. Understanding framing is crucial as it impacts how and when updated data from the lakehouse appears in reports.