We've spent decades getting the relationship between transactional systems and analytics backward.
In the early days of enterprise computing, organizations ran analytics directly on their transactional systems. This created performance nightmares as analytical queries locked up databases that were trying to process orders and run the business.
The industry responded by splitting systems: transactional workloads (OLTP) would run the business while separate analytical systems (OLAP) would handle reporting and analysis. This solved the performance problem but created a new one – data had to be copied from operational systems to analytical ones, typically through ETL processes.
This data movement approach became so ingrained that when we built new applications, we kept copying data around. Every SaaS product, every productivity tool, every planning application required its own data store, its own copy of the data.
The result? Data silos. Synchronization challenges. Inconsistent views of information. And tremendous inefficiency. If there’s something that all our customers agree on, it’s that they want to stop copying data again and again. While running transactional and analytical payloads from the same data store is still years away for most companies, keeping analytical data in one place is a realistic goal today.
Microsoft Fabric has created a new opportunity with its unified OneLake storage layer and decoupled compute engines. We can take business applications to where the data lives, rather than moving data to applications.
That's exactly what we've done with PowerTable, a no-code Fabric workload that works directly with your data where it already exists in or even outside Microsoft Fabric. No ETL. No disconnected, redundant copies. No synchronization headaches.
PowerTable lets business users build writeback-enabled table applications directly in Microsoft Fabric. There's no need for ETL or duplicating data. It connects live to your existing tables in Fabric SQL, Fabric Data Warehouse, Azure SQL, and a variety of external databases with bi-directional synchronization.
In practical terms, this means you can finally eliminate those brittle Excel spreadsheets your team uses to track everything from price lists to projects. You can build applications on top of your existing databases or semantic models and manage master data directly where it lives.
What's most important is that PowerTable pushes processing to your data platform rather than extracting data. Your IT team will appreciate this architectural distinction because it simplifies governance, improves performance, and reduces costs.
Meanwhile, your business users, already familiar with Power BI, will be able to access PowerTable and other future Lumel Fabric workloads in a couple of clicks for the same user interface, underpinned by governance set at the workspace level.
Our customers aim to ease data projects with PowerTable by reconciling the interests of business and IT teams.
For business teams, from finance to sales to operations and more, PowerTable can maintain master data that ERP or CRM systems don't handle well - like future pricing or products that aren't yet launched. This data sits alongside actuals data in the warehouse, providing a complete picture.
For IT teams, PowerTable reduces their backlog of application requests by giving business users tools to build their own scalable solutions without creating shadow IT. Since everything runs in Fabric, IT maintains governance while distributing development.
The shift to Microsoft Fabric represents a fundamental change in how enterprises manage data. By unifying storage in OneLake and providing specialized workloads for different processing needs, Microsoft has created an ecosystem where third-party applications like PowerTable can deliver more value with less complexity.
If you're investing in Fabric, adding PowerTable gives your business users the ability to build their own writeback-enabled applications on that foundation. They get capabilities typically associated with separate SaaS products, but without the data integration headaches.
This doesn’t mean you need to use Fabric for everything. In particular, Fabric works very well with other leading data platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks, which tellingly are exhibitors at FabCon conferences.
Accordingly, PowerTable offers direct connectors that read from and write back not only from Fabric’s own data warehouse and SQL database, but also work in the same way with Snowflake, Databricks, and soon, BigQuery and Oracle.
We at Lumel are convinced native apps built directly in data platforms vastly reduce data movement overhead generated by the proliferation of SaaS applications adopted by most companies during the past 10 years.
If battling with messy spreadsheets or convoluted data app builders sounds familiar, I recommend starting with a specific business problem that would be better off managed in your central repository.
Identify the data sources involved, the business rules that need to be applied, and the commenting or approval workflows required. This will give us a concrete example to use in demonstrating how PowerTable works with your specific requirements.
See what's possible with your data. Request a demo to explore how PowerTable connects to your sources, empowers business users to build applications, no coding required, and integrates seamlessly with your Microsoft ecosystem.
Build cleaner, smarter semantic models in Power BI and Fabric with PowerTable
