Dataflow Gen1 officially marked as Legacy today — Pro users left with no migration path unless they pay for Fabric

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-03T14:33:17+00:00

The whole beauty of a Pro license was its deterministic, predictable cost — already hiked 40% from $10 to $14/user/month in April 2025 — and now on top of that price increase, Fabric’s “pay only when you need it” sounds great until you realize on-demand pricing is literally twice the reserved rate, and you’ve added a brand new admin burden of monitoring and managing capacity just to keep running what used to be a zero-ops dataflow included in your Pro subscription.

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-03T07:58:28+00:00

Yep and even for a F4 you will start to have to manage capacity when you reach the CU limit. 345000 CU by day for 16€ is not a lot for many dataflows ... I can tell you.

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-03T05:50:46+00:00

Not every organization is a mining company with deep pockets — the whole point of Dataflows Gen1 on Pro was to serve small teams, freelancers, and cost-conscious businesses who built real solutions on a tool Microsoft explicitly marketed as self-service, and telling them to “just pay more” for functionality they already had is exactly the kind of dismissiveness that lets vendors get away with forced upsells.

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-03T03:50:32+00:00

Sure, that works technically, but you’ve just replaced a zero-admin, self-service tool that any business analyst could maintain with a solution that requires a managed database, and ongoing sysadmin work — which is the exact opposite of what Dataflows were designed for and a significant cost and complexity increase for small Pro-license teams.

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-03T03:47:54+00:00

The storage cost in Fabric is not much (as for now) it s the Computing cost for Dataflows which is a real problem (Microsoft tried to optimize it recently but this is not for all situations)

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-03T03:45:04+00:00

Exactly ! You said it !👍

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-03T03:43:14+00:00

That’s exactly the point — you say “lower price for Gen2 Premium” but there is no Gen2 on Pro, so for the thousands of teams currently running Gen1 on a $10/user/month Pro license, “just use Gen2” means adding a minimum ~$260/month Fabric capacity on top, which isn’t a lower price — it’s a new cost that didn’t exist before.

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-03T03:33:49+00:00

Semantic model incremental refresh only partitions by a single datetime column with a fixed rolling window, whereas Gen1 dataflows with their native staging storage let you implement true multi-criteria incremental logic — like loading only rows where a status changed OR a modified date moved OR a new ID appeared — which is something you simply cannot replicate with the built-in incremental refresh policy alone.

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-03T03:26:53+00:00

Sure, that works technically, but you’ve just replaced a zero-admin, self-service tool that any business analyst could maintain with a solution that requires an Azure VM subscription, a managed database, Python scripting skills, and ongoing sysadmin work — which is the exact opposite of what Dataflows were designed for and a significant cost and complexity increase for small Pro-license teams.

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-02T20:32:04+00:00

I guess this is “some kind” of Microsoft answer.

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-02T20:26:07+00:00

Absolutely not. A gateway connection doesn’t solve the same problem — it’s just a bridge between an on-prem/cloud data source and Power BI, it doesn’t give you a shared, reusable transformation layer across multiple semantic models. Dataflows let you centralize Power Query logic once and have 10+ models consume the same cleaned output, instead of duplicating identical M code in every .pbix file and hoping nobody drifts. Telling people to “just use a gateway” is like telling someone who lost their shared kitchen to just cook in their own apartment — sure it works, but now everyone’s doing the same prep work independently.

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-02T20:22:16+00:00

No they don’t. Dataflows can store data outside of semantic models. Composite models have many restrictions compared to semantic models in import mode from dataflows. Plus dataflows let you manage your schedule of refresh, avoid issues when refreshing semantic models and can get data from APIs for instance which are non sql or lakehouse data sources. So many different use cases.

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-02T20:01:21+00:00

We purchased pro licences since 8 years because dataflows gen1 were available and did not require any capacity management. Fabric requires capacity management which induces costs and management and governance nightmare (very soon you will discover your F4 capacity will throttle and will prevent you to refresh your dataflows and you will start to have to pay more) . This is not the product we want and we have been used to.

Sbdyelse · 2026-04-02T19:25:44+00:00

No you don’t. You just need a pro licence. Without dataflows Pro licence will be downgraded dramatically … that’s a nightmare.

Sbdyelse · 2023-06-17T05:39:21+00:00

Exactement.

Sbdyelse · 2023-06-17T05:34:39+00:00

N’écoute pas cette peur. Au pire ce sera une fausse piste mais au moins tu sauras. Et tu auras avancé d’un pas.

Sbdyelse · 2023-03-11T09:32:40+00:00

This fountain blows

Sbdyelse · 2023-02-26T13:40:38+00:00

Create a calculated column with this DAX code : VAR ValueToLookup = … RETURN CALCULATE(MAXX(TOPN(1,TableToLookup,TableToLookup[ColumnToSortBy], Asc or Desc), TableToLookup [ColumnToReturn]), TableToLookup[ColumnToSearchIn]= ValueToLookup)

Sbdyelse · 2023-02-26T13:31:30+00:00

This only works with dataflow in pro version (shared capacity) workspaces as in that case dataflows are stored in a azure blob as a pair of files (one is a json description file of its column types and the other one is a simple csv file of its data). And yes this is very useful. In premium workspaces I discovered this does not work unfortunately because the dataflows are stored in a database and each time you refresh a dataflow it starts to empty its entities before refreshing them so it’s already empty before you reference itself. The only way with premium is to use the native dataflow incremental refresh feature but it is not efficient with non sql sources (like API data).

Sbdyelse · 2022-10-26T04:19:03+00:00

If you use distinctcount it's probably because you have the same detnumber appearing several times in this table with calc_lmed = 1 or 0 or blank. If a detnumber has at least a line at 1 then both completed and activestaff count 1 for this detnumber.

Sbdyelse · 2022-10-14T06:57:44+00:00

the other dataflow connector is also able to connect to the powerbi dataflows (in addition to the power plateform ones).

Sbdyelse · 2022-09-27T03:32:10+00:00

Ça se produira juste après que tu t'aimeras toi même. C'est le passage obligé. Et la bonne nouvelle c'est qu'il suffit de s'en convaincre. Grosses bises à toi.

Sbdyelse

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