Best Practices For Power BI On Databricks Webinar

Databricks, DirectQuery, Import Mode, Power BI 1 Minute

I recently took part in a webinar with Denny Lee, Liping Huang and Marius Panga from Databricks on the subject of best practices for using Power BI on Databricks. You can view the recording on LinkedIn here:

https://www.linkedin.com/video/live/urn:li:ugcPost:7174102151407779841

…or on YouTube here:

My section at the beginning covering Power BI best practices for Import and DirectQuery doesn’t contain any new information – if you’ve been following the DirectQuery posts on this blog or read the DirectQuery guidance docs here and here then there won’t be any surprises. What I thought was really useful, though, was hearing the folks from Databricks talk about best practices on the Databricks side and this took up the majority of the webinar. Definitely worth checking out.

Published by Chris Webb

My name is Chris Webb, and I work on the Fabric CAT team at Microsoft. I blog about Power BI, Power Query, SQL Server Analysis Services, Azure Analysis Services and Excel.

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5 thoughts on “Best Practices For Power BI On Databricks Webinar”

  1. Thank you very much Chris for this webinar. It was very nice to hear guidance from both Microsoft and Databricks sides together.

    I was surprised not to hear any mention of Direct Lake in the webinar. It seems to be an interesting 3rd option along with Import and Direct Query, since Databricks naturally stores tables in the Delta format that DIrect Lake needs, and a OneLake shortcut can expose the Databricks tables in Fabric. Do you have any comment on that option please? Thanks!

    Reply

    1. The webinar was before the Fabric Conference where we revealed more details about our “better together” story for Fabric and Databricks. Using Direct Lake with Fabric and data from Databricks raises a lot of architectural questions that we didn’t want to go into and weren’t (and still aren’t) ready to answer.

      Reply

      1. Ok, that makes sense. Looking forward to see these architectural questions being discussed.

        Thanks!

  2. Hi Chris, Thanks as usual for sharing this information! We are using Databricks and Power BI (very early stage) and we have discussed the topic of “flat file” versus “star schema” many times. You were quite clear in stating that Power BI wants a star schema and all other documentation points that out as well. You eluded to some blog or webinar in which this was explained in more detail. Is there some documentation you can share that I can use to “defend” the idea of the star schema versus the flat file? Any feedback is much appreciated!

    Reply

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