8.4 — Building Real-Time Dashboards

Direct Lake makes real‑time BI simple. The architecture is straightforward:

Event Streams → Lakehouse → Gold → Direct Lake → Dashboard

Use Cases:

• Real‑time KPIs and sales dashboards
• Operational monitoring
• IoT analytics
• Fraud detection
• Supply chain visibility

No refresh jobs. No scheduled pipelines pushing data into Power BI. The Gold tables update, and the dashboard reflects it instantly.

Semantic Model Governance — Purview Integration

Semantic models aren’t just technical assets — they’re governed assets. Purview treats them as first-class citizens in the governance model.

Purview Capabilities for Semantic Models:

• Lineage — trace from source data through to the dashboard
• Sensitivity labels — classify models as Confidential, Internal, Public, etc.
• Access control — enforce who can use or edit a model
• Classification — identify PII, financial data, and regulated content
• Audit logs — track who accessed what and when
• Policy enforcement — prevent unauthorized use automatically

When a semantic model is governed, every report built on top of it inherits that governance. That’s what makes enterprise BI trustworthy.