Direct lake . When users interact with a report built from a Direct Lake semantic model that uses Delta tables and RLS of the warehouse, the DAX queries will operate in Direct Lake mode. This mode is specifically designed for analyzing large data volumes in Power BI and is based on loading parquet-formatted files directly from a data lake without querying a Lakehouse or Warehouse endpoint. Unlike DirectQuery, there is no translation from DAX to other query languages, and it does not execute queries on other database systems. This results in performance similar to import mode, with the added benefit of picking up any changes at the data source as they occur12.
Direct Lake mode supports row-level security (RLS), ensuring that users only see the data they have permission to view. It combines the advantages of both DirectQuery and import modes while avoiding their disadvantages, making it an ideal choice for very large models and models with frequent updates at the data source2.