I had the pleasure of speaking at RADACAD’s Power BI & Fabric Summit 2025, probably one of the largest Fabric events worldwide. It is organised by the fine folks over at RADACAD and brought together more than 150 speakers and thousands of attendees.
My session, titled ‘Analysing 4 Billion Rows Using Power BI DirectLake’, focused on the new Power BI and Fabric functionality of DirectLake, which makes it possible to query very large datasets in Power BI without loading the data, and without the performance struggles that come with DirectQuery models.
After a quick overview of Fabric, Spark, Delta Parquet, and DirectLake we jumped into a live demo that showcased a Power BI DirectLake report on top of delta tables containing 4 billion rows of New York City taxi data.
My session had an attendance of 225 participants. I’m so happy to have inspired a large group of people like this!
Analysing 4 billion rows of data using Power BI DirectLake and Fabric
Data volumes are going up and up. For most businesses, analysing more data at a faster pace becomes increasingly important to stay ahead.
In this session, I will demonstrate the use of Microsoft Fabric Lakehouses with a massive dataset containing 4 billion rows of data.
We will be looking at the performance implications of analysing such a huge dataset and showcasing Power BI’s DirectLake capabilities to handle big data without copying.
After this session you will be able to:
1. Understand DirectLake vs Import & DirectQuery
2. Set up a Power BI DirectLake connection in Microsoft Fabric
3. Run analyses in real-time on datasets in the billions of rows, without breaking a sweat
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