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Since Microsoft introduced Fabric, the term appears in almost every piece of Power BI documentation. Many companies wonder whether they have to switch and what changes for their existing reports. The short answer: for Pro-only users little changes, while companies with Premium capacity face quite a few changes. This article puts them into context (as of November 2026).
What is Microsoft Fabric?
Microsoft Fabric is an analytics platform delivered as software as a service, meaning a cloud service operated by Microsoft. It brings together several areas that used to be separate products: data integration (Data Factory), data preparation with Spark (Data Engineering), data warehousing, real-time analytics (Real-Time Intelligence), data science and Power BI.
Power BI is therefore part of Fabric. The familiar Power BI service continues to run and is integrated into the Fabric portal. Microsoft's documentation distinguishes between Power BI items (reports, semantic models, dashboards, paginated reports, dataflows) and other Fabric items (lakehouses, warehouses, notebooks, pipelines and more).
OneLake: one shared data store
A central building block is OneLake, a single data store for the entire organisation. Data is stored there in the open Delta format, a table format based on Parquet files that other tools can read as well. The idea is to store data once and use it from different services instead of copying it multiple times.
For Power BI users this is mainly relevant when data from several systems has to be combined and prepared. That preparation can happen in Fabric, for example in a lakehouse, a store that combines files and tables.
Direct Lake: a new storage mode for semantic models
Until now, Power BI models mainly offered two storage modes: Import, which copies data into the model, and DirectQuery, which passes every query through to the source. Fabric adds Direct Lake.
Direct Lake loads data directly from Delta tables in OneLake into memory. According to Microsoft, it achieves query performance similar to Import without copying all data on every refresh. A refresh only processes metadata and often takes just seconds.
| Storage mode | Where data lives | Licensing requirement |
|---|---|---|
| Import | copy in the model | any Power BI or Fabric licence |
| DirectQuery | in the source | any Power BI or Fabric licence |
| Direct Lake | Delta tables in OneLake | Fabric capacity only |
Microsoft states that Import and DirectQuery remain relevant. For many mid-sized companies with moderate data volumes, Import is still the simplest option. Note also that Direct Lake does not support gateways, only cloud connections.
Premium capacity is being replaced by F SKUs
The biggest change affects companies with Power BI Premium per capacity (P1 to P5). Microsoft no longer sells new P SKUs, and existing agreements cannot renew them at the end of their term. The successors are Fabric capacities (F SKUs), purchased through Azure.
Mapping is based on compute: P1 corresponds to F64, P2 to F128 and so on. Migration is not automatic. According to Microsoft, you need to buy an F SKU, reassign workspaces and only then cancel the P SKU. If a P SKU ends without a successor, a 30-day grace period starts; after that, access is throttled and from day 91 operations are rejected.
F SKUs come with some differences:
- Billing: pay-as-you-go per second or with a reservation, with regional pricing.
- Pause and scale: capacities can be paused and resized. The autoscale feature known from P SKUs does not exist.
- Power BI Embedded: included with every F SKU.
- Smaller sizes: starting at F2 rather than P1. Free viewing of Power BI content still requires at least F64.
What stays the same for Pro users?
If you use Power BI with Pro licences only, you can carry on as before. Reports, semantic models, gateways and scheduled refreshes work unchanged. Premium Per User is explicitly not affected by the P SKU retirement.
However, Pro and PPU licences alone do not allow Fabric items such as lakehouses or notebooks. These require a Fabric capacity or a trial capacity. Microsoft offers a 60-day Fabric trial.
A minor change concerns terminology: what used to be a workspace's "license mode" is now called its "workspace type". The functionality has not changed.
Copilot in Power BI
Copilot is an AI assistant that can, among other things, summarise report pages and create reports from a description. According to Microsoft, Copilot requires a paid Fabric capacity of F2 or larger or a P SKU; trial capacities are not sufficient. Copilot consumes capacity compute.
Relevant for companies in Europe: for capacities within the EU Data Boundary, Microsoft states that Copilot requests are also processed within that boundary (as of November 2026).
What should you do now?
- Check which licences and capacities you currently use.
- If you have a P SKU: find out when your agreement ends and plan the migration to an F SKU in good time.
- Use the Fabric Capacity Metrics app to measure actual utilisation and choose the right F SKU.
- If you only use Pro: assess whether Fabric features such as lakehouses or Direct Lake offer concrete value. Switching is not mandatory.
- If appropriate, test a clearly scoped use case with the 60-day trial.
- Review tenant settings, for example who may create Fabric items and use Copilot.
How Simplify Data can help
Simplify Data supports companies in Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg and remotely across Germany in evaluating Fabric, planning licences and migrating existing Power BI environments. Find out more on our Power BI page.