Unifying Power BI Datamarts with Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse: The Evolution You Need to Optimize Your Data Operations
In May 2022, we announced the preview of datamarts in Power BI, a self-service capability within Power BI Premium that enables users at all levels to discover valuable insights from their own data in a relational database, without the need for assistance from the IT team. Since then, we have been gathering feedback to improve this tool and, in response to your suggestions, we are announcing the unification of Power BI datamarts with Microsoft Fabric data warehouses.
Why the unification of Datamarts with Fabric Data Warehouse?
Although datamarts offer a simpler experience for SQL analysis, some users expressed concerns about scalability and performance. With the release of Microsoft Fabric, now you don't have to choose between a Power BI datamart and a full-featured data warehouse. The Fabric Data Warehouse is the natural evolution of Power BI datamarts, built on next-generation analytics technology, with powerful AI capabilities that improve both the experience and the results of your analytics.
Main advantages of Fabric Data Warehouse:
- DDL/DML support: Create and manage SQL objects with DML/DDL support and multi-table transaction guarantees.
- Improved Scalability: Power BI datamarts were limited to 100GB, while Fabric Data Warehouse can handle any size data with fast, optimized query execution.
- Open Data Format: Files stored in Delta/Parquet formats to improve interoperability between engines and facilitate collaboration between analysts and data scientists.
- Integration with AI: Fabric's SQL engine is powered by AI to deliver the best query performance without the need for manual tuning.
- Advanced Security: Granular access at the object, row and column level, ensuring that only appropriate users have access to sensitive data.
- Queries between Databases: Perform queries on multiple databases within the same Fabric workspaces.
- Efficient Development: With tools like Git, data pipeline integration and an enhanced T-SQL experience, the development process becomes much more agile and collaborative.
Migration and Future of Datamarts
As of June 1, 2025, the creation of new datamarts in Power BI will no longer be available. As of October 1, 2025, existing datamarts will no longer be supported and will be removed from workspaces. To avoid losing your data and affecting related reports, it is recommended to migrate your datamarts to Fabric Data Warehouse as soon as possible.
How to migrate datamarts to Fabric Data Warehouse?
There are different options to migrate your datamarts, from using acceleration scripts to manual steps to export your schema and data and create a new data warehouse in Fabric.
Migration to Fabric Data Warehouse
Migrating datamarts to Fabric Data Warehouse not only improves scalability and performance, but also allows you to take advantage of features such as data retrieval, direct lake modeling and advanced security. Plus, with the AI integration and Machine Learning capabilities of Microsoft Fabric, your data will be ready for the analytics challenges of the future.
Why migrate to Microsoft Fabric Data Warehouse?
This unification allows you to take advantage of all the benefits of an enterprise data warehouse with the flexibility of Power BI. Seamless integration with other Microsoft Fabric services such as Power BI, Data Science and AI ensures that you can extract the maximum value from your data without additional complications.
For more details on how to migrate your datamarts to Fabric Data Warehouse and all the benefits of this evolution, please refer to the official migration documentation.
