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12 posts
February 20, 2026
Mike and Tommy dive deep into what it means to live in a Direct Lake world, exploring the practical realities of building semantic models on top of Fabric lakehouses. They cover the trade-offs, gotchas, and best practices for teams making the shift from Import mode to Direct Lake.
December 10, 2025
Mike and Tommy break down what it means to model semantic models directly in the Power BI service—why it’s a big deal for Mac users, collaboration, and faster iteration. They also highlight version history as a safety net for live edits and discuss how the web experience changes the modeling workflow.
November 6, 2025
Mike Carlo and Pragati walk through everything you need to know to level up from PL-300 to DP-600 — from lakehouses and pipelines to semantic model optimization and security in Microsoft Fabric.
April 30, 2025
Mike and Tommy explore whether recent Fabric updates change how we should design a lakehouse architecture. With Direct Lake now available in Power BI Desktop and new workspace item limits, the design conversation is shifting fast.
April 23, 2025
Mike, Tommy, and guest Ginger Grant explore whether now is the right time for data scientists to make the switch to Microsoft Fabric. They dive into the evolving data platform landscape and what a Director of Data should consider when adopting Fabric.
April 11, 2025
Mike and Tommy break down the biggest DAX and semantic model announcements from FabCon 2025. From Direct Lake improvements to DAX calendars and user-defined functions, this episode covers what matters most for Power BI practitioners.
February 14, 2025
Mike and Tommy dig into what it means for Power BI semantic models to move ‘onto the web’, from editing models directly in the service to live editing Direct Lake models from Desktop. They also connect the dots on governance, versioning, and cost—so you can adopt the new workflows without breaking your production reporting.
December 29, 2023
Customer 360 isn’t a dashboard—it’s an operating model for joining CRM, marketing, product, and support signals into one story. In Ep. 280, the team breaks down why Fabric’s shortcuts/mirroring + Direct Lake are promising for reducing data-copy chaos (while still forcing you to solve identity and definitions).
October 18, 2023
Ep. 259 asks the question every Fabric builder runs into: does a star schema still matter in a Direct Lake world? The answer: yes—especially if DAX is involved—but Fabric changes where the shaping work belongs (upstream) and raises the bar on governance.
July 26, 2023
Ep. 235 is a practical episode for anyone stuck in ‘fix the dashboard’ mode: it shows how to trace undesirable effects back to real root causes using a systems mindset. You’ll also learn what Chris Webb’s Fabric tests reveal about Direct Lake ‘data hotness’, capacity limits, and why some queries can quietly fall back to DirectQuery.
June 7, 2023
In Ep. 221, Mike, Tommy, and Seth break down OneLake and Direct Lake in Microsoft Fabric—what they are, how they work together, and where the sharp edges still are. If you’re trying to pick a durable lakehouse pattern, this episode gives you the mental model for shortcuts, security, and performance before you bet your architecture on the new stack.
May 26, 2023
Ep. 218 is a high-energy breakdown of Microsoft Fabric—why it feels like the next evolution of the Power BI platform, and the governance, capacity, and admin decisions you should consider before enabling it broadly.