When Power BI Desktop opens a Direct Lake semantic model this way, every change is written straight back to the copy in Fabric. Nothing is saved locally or published, Report view is unavailable, and each session starts a fresh version history point.
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Terms in this definition
- Power BI Desktop
A free Windows program where authors connect to sources, shape and model data, and design reports before publishing them to the Power BI service. Dashboards are not made here.
- Direct Lake
Mode for Fabric semantic models that loads Delta or Parquet files from OneLake straight into VertiPaq, giving almost import-level performance without duplicating data.
- 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.
- View
Shows a system through one chosen group of related concerns. No view is generic; each one is tied to whichever architecture it depicts.