One key aspect of Power BI dataflows is that they store their data in CDM Folders in Azure Data Lake Storage gen2.^[1] When a dataflow is refreshed, the queries that define the dataflow entities are executed, and their results are stored in the underlying CDM Folders in the data lake.

By default the Power BI service hides the details of the underlying storage. Only the Power BI service can write to the CDM folders, and only the Power BI service can read from them.

NARRATOR:

But Matthew knew that there are other options beyond the default…

Because the CDM folder format is an open standard, any service or application can create them. A CDM folder can be produced by Azure Data Factory, Azure Databricks, or any other service that can output text and JSON files. Once the CDM folder exists, we just need to let Power BI know…

A little over a week ago I attended the Dutch Dynamics Community again, for the first time in a while. It was good to catch up and exchange news with peers in my network.

„You’ve been quiet Mark!“ is what I’ve been told a few times and that’s true. For some time I try to be quiet and focus on things that are more personal like being a dad of five now and trying to manage the project of fixing up my Land Rover Defender.

It’s not a secret that for quite a while I was in big disagreement with the roadmap Microsoft was following and my resignation as Microsoft MVP was a direct result of that.

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” ― Winston Churchill

Last week I’ve joined over 1.400 of my fellow Navision enthousiasts into NAVTechDays. In the…

It’s been two weeks since Power BI dataflows became publicly available in preview, and there’s been a flood of interest and excitement as people have started exploring and using this new capability for self-service data preparation.

There has also been a growing trickle of confusion. To illustrate this confusion, I will share a few examples.

Here’s the first example: A comment thread from a few weeks ago on this post, initiated by Neville:

The potential confusion here may come from the fact that Power BI dataflow entities are similar in purpose to tables in a data warehouse or data mart. But due to many factors (including the underlying storage being in files in a data lake) it is not generally appropriate to think of dataflows as a replacement for a data warehouse. While there may be exceptions to this rule, any time you hear someone saying you don’t need…