Licensing is always an important topic for any technology, often it can drive architectural decisions. In many cases, licensing models can be difficult to understand, particularly since vendors tend to not like to dwell on discussions of cost. My last post on Fabric licensing was an attempt to help to clarify some of the “squishy” language around licensing for the recently introduced Microsoft Fabric.
That recent post centers on the cost for Fabric compute, but there is another licensing component to Fabric – for storage. With the GA of Fabric last week at Microsoft Ignite, the time is approaching that customers will be charged for storage, so it’s equally important to understand how that works as well. This recently became obvious to me as I was a participant in an online discussion with MVPs and product team members about this very topic, and if we’re not clear, chances are that another clarification post is required.
This discussion was started by Tristan Malherbe (@Datatouille), and he did most of the clarifying work – I am just posting here for accessibility. Thanks Tristan!
As mentioned above, there are two components to Fabric costs, the cost for compute, and the cost for data storage. The cost for compute is a function of the capacities that are used (Microsoft Fabric – Pricing | Microsoft Azure). Due to the way Fabric stores data, that cost is quite cheap, especially compared to the cost of storing data in transactional database systems (ie Azure SQL). It is in line with general blob storage in an Azure storage account at a list price of approximately $0.025/GB/month. Simple enough, right?
This storage price is true for all Fabric artifact that store data, with one exception. Power BI artifacts are exempt from additional storage costs up to 100 TB of storage per capacity. Any storage beyond that amount is subject to the ~$0.025/GB/month charge. The question therefore is, what, exactly is a Power BI artifact?
Qualifying Power BI artifacts are:
- semantic models (datasets)
- reports
- dashboards
- dataflows (Gen1)
- datamarts
- paginated reports.
It should be noted however that when the recently introduced OneLake integration for import-mode semantic models is used the data cache is stored OneLake, NOT in the semantic model itself. It is therefore subject to the Fabric storage pricing, but it will not count against your 100 TB storage quota for Power BI storage.
In summary,
- ALL Fabric SKUs include 100 TB storage for Power BI artifacts
- A Power BI artifact is any of the following items: datasets, reports, dashboards, dataflows (Gen1), datamarts, paginated reports
- Any other Fabric artifacts (lakehouse, warehouse etc.) are charged ~ $0.025/GB/month for storage
- Semantic models using the “OneLake integration for Import-mode semantic models” are charged ~ $0.025/GB/month for storage
Hopefully this helps.
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