Microsoft Fabric and Power BI Deployments Face ETL Breakage from Dataflow Gen1 Retirement

EPC Group Warns: Dataflow Gen1 Retirement Will Break Enterprise ETL

HOUSTON, TX -- April 23, 2026. EPC Group today warned enterprise Power BI and Microsoft Fabric customers that the retirement of Power BI Dataflow Gen1 will break production ETL pipelines for organizations that have not yet migrated to Dataflow Gen2 inside Microsoft Fabric.

What is breaking

• Dataflow Gen1 entities lose support, refresh capability, and access to Microsoft Premium and Fabric capacity feature releases
• Power BI semantic models that source from Gen1 entities silently fail or return stale data
• Paginated reports and dashboards depending on the broken semantic models produce wrong numbers without obvious failure signals
• Self-service business users are typically the first to notice, often after a regulator or executive reads a stale figure

What the migration involves

Dataflow Gen2 inside Microsoft Fabric is the Microsoft-recommended successor. Migration is not a simple rename -- Gen2 uses a different storage layer (OneLake), different connectors, different scheduling, and different governance surface.

EPC Group published Dataflow Gen1 to Microsoft Fabric Migration Enterprise Playbook covers discovery, dependency mapping, parallel-run validation, and cutover planning.

How to assess your exposure

EPC Group offers a fixed-fee Dataflow Gen1 to Fabric Migration assessment covering tenant-wide Gen1 inventory, downstream dependency mapping (semantic models, reports, dashboards), Gen2 target-state design, and migration sequencing.

Contact

To scope a Dataflow Gen1 to Microsoft Fabric migration, call (888) 381-9725, email contact@epcgroup.net, or visit www.epcgroup.net/contact.