Microsoft Fabric, Lakehouses and Power BI: A guide for BI developers

Proposed session for SQLBits 2026

TL; DR

Learn how Microsoft Fabric’s SaaS data platform impacts Power BI. We’ll cover lakehouses, warehouses, parquet storage, DirectLake vs. DirectQuery/Import, and show how common Power BI patterns—like incremental refresh—work inFabric.

Session Details

Microsoft Fabric is here, and it fundamentally changes our data landscape. It introduces a Power BI like SaaS model for the data platform. You can now with a few clicks ingest data into the cloud by running pipelines, create a Lakehouse to make that data accessible and run Python, Spark, SQL and DAX on top of it. What does this all mean for Power BI? There are a lot of architectural changes, and you might wonder if you now need to start refactoring your Power BI solutions.

In this session we get you ready to decide whether you want to start using the new Fabric workloads for your Power BI solutions. First, we do an introduction of Microsoft Fabric is, then we will get an overview of lakehouse and how the data is stored in parquet files under the covers. Finally, we will see how this data is being exposed to Power BI through Directlake and how this differs from DirectQuery or Import. Then we will close off with demos where we solve some common Power BI patterns like incremental refresh and transactions on top of data getting loaded into the Fabric lakehouse.

3 things you'll get out of this session

- Learn how Fabric’s lakehouse architecture and storage work. - Understand when to use DirectLake vs. Import or DirectQuery. - See how common Power BI patterns change with Fabric.

Kasper de Jonge's other proposed sessions for 2026

Unlocking AI Potential: Leveraging Your Data with Microsoft Fabric - 2026

The Ultimate Fabric Security Deep Dive You Didn’t Know You Needed - 2026

Kasper de Jonge's previous sessions

Fabric security: everything you need to know!

Learn how Microsoft Fabric makes sure your data is secure. Did you know for example that all data is encrypted by default? Or that you can configure MFA for all your users? Fabric offers many of these possibilities and more out of the box without most of us knowing! In this session you will learn everything to convince your security team

Understanding Zero Trust security

In this session we will look at what Zero Trust principles are. Zero Trust is the modern way to apply security. It assumes a breach, verifies every user, and enforces least privilege, giving users access only to the private applications and resources they need. It no longer secures the perimeter (the network boundaries) which doesn't scale in the modern world. We will see how it applies to your Microsoft services like Microsoft Fabric too.