22-25 April 2026 
Navigating Data Modeling in Direct Lake
Proposed session for SQLBits 2026TL; DR
We explore how Direct Lake impacts traditional data modeling approaches, posing essential questions on star schemas, surrogate keys, SCDs, and other classical dimensional modeling techniques.
Session Details
In this session, we'll dive into the Direct Lake, the new Power BI storage mode that seamlessly blends DirectQuery's real-time capabilities and Import mode's performance.
We unravel how this promising technology impacts traditional data modeling approaches, posing essential questions on star schemas, surrogate keys, SCDs, and other classical dimensional modeling techniques.
This session equips you with a deeper understanding of the Direct Lake landscape and its implications for data modeling, empowering you to craft performant data models.
The key areas we'll explore are:
- Overview of Direct Lake
- Impact of Direct Lake on data modeling techniques
- Redefining data transformation strategies
We unravel how this promising technology impacts traditional data modeling approaches, posing essential questions on star schemas, surrogate keys, SCDs, and other classical dimensional modeling techniques.
This session equips you with a deeper understanding of the Direct Lake landscape and its implications for data modeling, empowering you to craft performant data models.
The key areas we'll explore are:
- Overview of Direct Lake
- Impact of Direct Lake on data modeling techniques
- Redefining data transformation strategies
3 things you'll get out of this session
- Overview of Direct Lake
- Impact of Direct Lake on data modeling techniques
- Redefining data transformation strategies
Speakers
Mathias Halkjaer's other proposed sessions for 2026
Beware! SQL Injection through ADF/Pipelines - 2026
Fabric Data Agents and beyond - 2026
Ingesting API data with Python Notebooks - 2026
The Future of Data - 2026
Vibecoding examples for data professionals - 2026
Vibe-coding for the data professional - 2026
When data lies - typical patterns for manipulating data - 2026
Mathias Halkjaer's previous sessions
Nose-Dive Narratives: Slide Karaoke 2024
Get ready to wrap up a serious day of learning with a dash of humor, spontaneity, and friendly competition! SQLBits presents "Slide Karaoke" where SQLBits speakers reveal their hidden talents while vying for bragging rights. This session promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience that will leave you in stitches and awe, and the speakers scrambling for their non-existent notes!
A deep dive into Direct Lake
The new Direct Lake storage mode in Power BI promises to revolutionize data handling by blending the real-time nature of DirectQuery and the high performance of Import mode. Is this all just hype, or does Direct Lake truly deliver on these claims?
Advanced Power BI refresh with ADF/Synapse
After this session, you will be able to conceptualize and implement different Power BI refresh scheduling patterns in ADF/Synapse. You’ll learn what limitations in Power BI you can overcome with an “external” orchestration tool as well as the different building blocks available. Finally, we will go through an example implementation as well as a step-by-step demo of how you can set this up yourself.
Supercharge Power BI with Azure Synapse Analytics
In this session we will cover how to architect an end-to-end enterpise analytics platform so that we utilize the best of both worlds. The extremely versatile ETL capabilities of Synapse and the powerful data modelling in Power BI.