Hi everyone! 😊
We’re in the process of migrating our existing Azure SQL-based data warehouse to Microsoft Fabric, and I’d really appreciate some advice or suggestions from this amazing community. I’ve learned a lot from the posts and guidance shared here already, and I’m truly thankful for all the insights and support people offer.
Current Architecture:
- We use Azure SQL DB as our data warehouse.
- Data is staged from IBM DB2, then typed and incrementally loaded into SQL.
- We have dim and fact views built on top, which are consumed by SSAS models and Power BI.
- For historical data, we archive older views into tables (refreshed yearly), while the most recent 2 years remain live for easier access.
Planned Migration to Microsoft Fabric:
We're moving to a Lakehouse model in Fabric, with the following structure:
- Bronze: Raw files stored as Parquet.
- Silver: Cleaned and type-casted tables.
- Gold: Business logic applied tables— targeting Direct Lake(not sure) for Power BI reporting.
Challenges and Questions:
Some of our business logic involves updates and merges, and we’re concerned about performance with large tables (some with 48 million rows). The business rules we need to apply include:
- Converting all sales values to GBP
- Finding and applying the latest product cost
- Updating rebate percentages, which often change retroactively over the past 7–8 months
Also, we’re trying to figure out how to best handle historical data in Fabric — our current method of archiving into tables and keeping only recent data live (via views) has worked well.
What I’d love your input on:
- What’s the best way to handle these kinds of business rules in Fabric without performance bottlenecks?
- Should we move this logic to Dataflows Gen2, Notebooks, Lakehouse SQL, or something else?
- Any best practices for managing historical data in Microsoft Fabric?
Any advice, war stories, or examples would be hugely appreciated! Thanks again to everyone who shares their knowledge here — it really helps people like me navigate these big changes. 🙏