I used AI tools to help draft and edit this post. I checked the facts and the wording, and the original lives at geekindata.com . The diagrams are on that page.

Three levers: build, refresh, and read mode

Key takeaways

Document build, model refresh or framing, and storage mode as three levers with owners.

Orchestrate lake transforms, then trigger refresh only when dependents changed.

Prefer Direct Lake for large facts when the Delta layout fits; avoid SQL-endpoint comfort food.

Put MLV refresh in the DAG; partial freshness is worse than honest staleness.

Use a fixed identity for unattended Direct Lake and Import refresh.

Keep an incremental or skip-if-unchanged policy for Import and lake builds.

Fresh gold tables are useless if the semantic model still points at yesterday, or if refresh burns an hour on a fact you could have incrementalized. Refresh is an architecture problem: orchestration, identity, and storage mode.…