Parquet Layout for Power BI Direct Lake: V-Order and the Alternatives

Direct Lake reads the Parquet files directly, so query speed and capacity cost depend on how those files were written. If Fabric writes your tables, V-Order is the obvious choice. But when data comes from external writers such as Databricks or Delta Rust, V-Order is not available.

In this session, Mimoune explores the alternatives and shows how row-group size, dictionary encoding and sort order can help you get close to the same benefits. The session is backed by measurements from the same models built by four different writers across six datasets.