Positioning Power BI Dataflows

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…