Power BI is a strong consumption tool. The question is whether it should also be your semantic authoring surface, and what that choice costs you in compute, governance, and architectural flexibility over time. This brief lays out the risks and a practical path forward.
What you’ll learn:
- Why Power BI’s “semantic model” rebrand is architectural misdirection, and what the artifact actually is
- Six structural problems with modeling inside Power BI, from Fabric cost duplication to the April 2026 Databricks connector incident
- The five open protocols (XMLA, MDX, DAX, SQL, MCP) a portable semantic layer must speak, and why they already run in your stack
- Why every major cloud vendor except Microsoft is participating in the Open Semantic Interchange (OSI)
- A seven-step migration plan to move semantic authoring outside Power BI without disrupting Power BI users
