Each warehouse, lakehouse or mirrored item used to come with an automatically generated Power BI semantic model. That stopped on 5 September 2025, and by 30 November 2025 the existing ones had been turned into independent semantic models.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Default semantic model in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Warehouse
Fabric item offering complete T-SQL support (DML, DDL, multi-table transactions) over Delta tables held in OneLake; lakehouse SQL analytics endpoints, by contrast, are read-only.
- Lakehouse
Fabric storage item in OneLake that holds structured and unstructured content side by side: managed Delta tables go under Tables, other files under Files. Spark is used for processing, and a read-only SQL analytics endpoint allows T-SQL queries.
- Power BI
Microsoft's analytics and reporting service. It reaches data held on-premises through the on-premises data gateway.
- Semantic model
Sometimes called an OLAP model, this Power BI and Fabric layer defines the measures, hierarchies, tables and relationships that reports and dashboards query; star schema design is the usual pattern.