The in-memory engine behind Power BI; Direct Lake pulls Delta and Parquet data into it.
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Terms in this definition
- Power BI
Microsoft's analytics and reporting service. It reaches data held on-premises through the on-premises data gateway.
- 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.
- Parquet
Columnar file format, open source and aimed at analytics. Event Hubs Capture cannot produce it natively.
Related terms
- Analysis Services
VertiPaq, Microsoft's in-memory analytics engine, sits underneath every Power BI semantic model and is likewise available as Azure Analysis Services or SQL Server Analysis Services. Tools connect to it over XMLA, using its client libraries.
- Formula engine
Plans how a DAX query will be answered inside a semantic model, then asks the storage engine, VertiPaq for Import and Direct Lake, to fetch data and do the first aggregations.
- Storage engine
VertiPaq: the in-memory column store behind Import and Direct Lake models. It scans data and does early aggregation, handing results up to the formula engine, which plans queries; most DAX performance work aims to lighten its load.
- Value encoding
VertiPaq applies it to numbers, keeping the actual values and achieving its strongest compression. Columns holding text use hash encoding instead, built on a dictionary of distinct entries, which is why turning a text key with many unique values into whole numbers may reduce model size.