Atlanta Microsoft BI Group Meeting on December 1st (Migrating Semantic Models to Fabric Direct Lake)

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Atlanta BI fans, please join us in person for our next meeting on Monday, December 1st at 18:30 ET. I’ll show you how to Fabric DirectLake semantic models can help you tackle long refresh cycles and scalability headaches. And your humble correspondent will walk you through some of the latest Power BI and Fabric enhancements. Improving will sponsor the meeting. For more details and sign up, visit our group page.

Delivery: In-person
Level: Intermediate
Food: Pizza and drinks will be provided

Agenda:
18:15-18:30 Registration and networking
18:30-19:00 Organizer and sponsor time (news, Power BI latest, sponsor marketing)
19:00-20:15 Main presentation
20:15-20:30 Q&A

Overview: Are your Power BI semantic models hitting memory limits? Tired of bending backwards to mitigate long refresh cycles and scalability headaches? Join me for a deep dive into Fabric Direct Lake — a game-changing feature that can help enterprise customers eliminate refreshes, lower licensing cost, and work with production-scale data instantly.

You’ll learn:
-Why Direct Lake is a breakthrough for large semantic models
-How to migrate from Import mode with real-world tools and strategies
-Common pitfalls and how to avoid them
-Performance insights and practical tips from actual project

Bonus: See how AI tools like Grok, Copilot or ChatGPT can streamline your migration process!

Whether you’re a BI pro, data engineer, or decision-maker, this session will equip you with the knowledge to scale smarter, design better, and deliver faster.

Speaker: Teo Lachev is a consultant, author, and mentor, with a focus on Microsoft BI. Through his Atlanta-based company Prologika (a Microsoft Gold Partner in Data Analytics and Data Platform) he designs and implements innovative solutions that bring tremendous value to his clients. Teo has authored and co-authored several books, and he has been leading the Atlanta Microsoft Business Intelligence group since he founded it in 2010. Microsoft has recognized Teo’s contributions to the community by awarding him the prestigious Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Data Platform status for 15 years. Microsoft selected Teo as one of only 30 FastTrack Solution Architects for Power BI worldwide.

Sponsor: Prologika (https://prologika.com) helps organizations of all sizes to make sense of data by delivering tailored BI solutions that drive actionable insights and maximize ROI. Your BI project will be your best investment!

Presentation Slides

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SaaS Losers and Winners: Paylocity and Element

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“We are sailing to Philadelphia
A world away from the coaly Tyne
Sailing to Philadelphia
To draw the line
The Mason-Dixon line”
“Sailing to Philadelphia”, Mark Knopfler

As I’ve said in the past, I consider it a travesty when a SaaS provider disallows direct access to the data in its native storage, such as by ODBC and OLE DB providers, and force you to use file extracts or APIs (often horrible and typically designed for app integration and not DW loads). This greatly inhibits data integration scenarios, such as extracting data for data warehousing. I wrote on this subject many times, including here, here and here.

Continuing on this subject, let’s consider two other vendors: Paylocity and Element.

SaaS Loser: Paylocity

Like Workday, Paylocity is a popular HR cloud platform. And like Workday, Paylocity doesn’t provide direct access to their database citing “security and IP concerns”. Instead, you must resort to “work in progress” APIs. Or opt for Paylocity pushing file extracts to an SFTP server set up by you or them.

In both cases, Paylocity charges a setup fee and per-employee fee. This will be the equivalent of putting your money in the bank and they charging you a withdrawal fee for every dollar you get out. This is actually not a far-fetched example considering that banks in some countries have started deposit fees. And who knows what lies ahead with the resurgence of socialism, but I digress…

SaaS Winner: Element

Element is a niche ERP system for environmental testing. Element stores data in an Azure SQL database. They provide direct access to the database as though it’s on-premises data store. Getting write access is not an issue if you are fine with the usual disclaimer. This proved extremely useful in a current project where complex business rules require creating temporary and permanent tables. Why can’t we have more of these SSAS vendors?

When it comes to choosing a SaaS vendor, you must draw a line: is it your data that must be easily accessible or is it vendor’s property with strings attached?