The Data Engine Room

Some of you will be familiar with dynamic row level security (DRLS) in PowerBI. For those that aren't, DRLS allows us to use the email address of the user that is logged into the service via their Entra account. With this email address, and corresponding email address in our semantic model, we can dynamically filter the semantic model to only show the data that user could see. The result, we can use one report suite to serve the same content to country, region, and global teams whilst simultaneously providing the necessary security around sensitive data. Now back in the world of Power BI, that was really easy. We fired up Power BI desktop, went into manage security roles, and added the necessary DAX: Now in Fabric, that still works exactly the same way as it always has for import and DirectQuery semantic models. However, it's not so straight forward for DirectLake semantic models. Why? The challenge is that a number of features break DirectLake connections and force the model b...

Earlier in the year I wrote a LinkedIn post about semantic models. To start this blog, I thought I'd expand upon the post and help those moving from an old school on-premise setup to a modern data platform such as Fabric. For the purposes of this post I'm going to focus on Microsoft houses, but the concepts being discussed are equally relevant for all BI platforms.