Microsoft Fabric Meetup | Governance and Direct Lake in Fabric

Join us for our NEXT Microsoft Fabric Meetup event in May.

Event Details

📅 Date: Thursday, 21st of May 2026, 6 p.m.
📍 Location: Microsoft Office, Hamburg
🍴 Food and Drinks Provided

Agenda

18:00 – Arrive, grab a drink, and find your spot

18:15 – Governance Quest
Fabric (Power BI) – requesting a license, enabling Excel export, a slow report... sounds like three simple IT tickets. It isn’t. Behind each of these requests lies a decision that goes far beyond technology and the wrong answer costs you valuable lives. In this session, Fabric (Power BI) governance becomes a real experience: instead of slides, there are cards. Instead of just listening, you actively play. With the “Governance Game” a custom-designed card game built around Microsoft Fabric (Power BI) you and the other participants make decisions based on real-life scenarios from the Fabric world. Who is responsible? What comes first? And why is the seemingly obvious technical solution almost never the right first step? The answers will surprise you and so will the discussions at your table. If you miss this session, you’re not just missing a game. You’re missing the insight that will make every future Fabric decision in your organization easier.
Speaker: Kathrin Borchert - May the POWER of Fabric BI with you! || ✨️MVP for Power BI & Fabric✨️ || Master Chief @YoDaBI || Speaker || Trainer || Coach || Ca-t-ech-fluencer 🐱🐈‍⬛💻

19:00 – Short Break

19:15 – Direct Lake in Microsoft Fabric – Hype, Reality, and Best Practices
Direct Lake is one of the most exciting building blocks in Microsoft Fabric: no traditional import, no Power Query, and direct queries on Delta tables in OneLake. It sounds like the perfect storage mode—but is it really?
In this meetup, we will take a closer look at Direct Lake and position it realistically in comparison to Import and DirectQuery.
Using short demos and real-world examples, we will discuss key prerequisites (including the concept of a Semantic Model Ready Gold Layer), the topic of DirectQuery fallbacks, memory and column loading behavior, as well as the dreaded “guardrails.”
We will also cover performance considerations at every level—both for the underlying physical Delta tables and for the data modeling itself.
Speaker: Dirk Seifert - Data Analytics Engineer @ Obungi & Matthias Hufnagel - Power Platform Consultant @ Obungi

20:00 – Discussion & Drinks
Engage with our speakers and participants in discussions while enjoying some refreshments.

Don't miss this opportunity to enhance your Microsoft Fabric expertise, exchange ideas, and network with the community.

We look forward to seeing you there!