This story is specific to Power BI in Microsoft Fabric, and to a real architectural limitation that shaped how snapshot reporting had to be designed.
As a Lead BI Engineer, I didn’t wake up one day and decide to create chaos.
It started innocently.
No problem.
Power BI allowed one app per workspace, so the solution seemed obvious:
That was year one.
At the time, this felt like discipline.
The next year, the same request came in.
So we did it again:
Still manageable. Still defensible.
Still wrong - We just didn’t know it yet.
This was copying, not designing.
By year three, something subtle had happened.
Workspaces were no longer environments.
They had become time containers:
Each one contained:
We weren’t versioning reports.
We were forking reality by year.
This was brittleness setting in.
Here’s the important part.
Nothing inside those workspaces was meaningfully different.
The only difference was time.
And time was being modeled as infrastructure.
We felt that truth daily.
Each new snapshot workspace meant:
Users didn’t say: “I need the FY24 snapshot.”
They said:
“I opened the report and the numbers look different.”
Now we had to ask:
“Which workspace did you open?”
That line hit uncomfortably close.
Workspaces were never meant to answer:
But we forced them to.
We turned infrastructure into a proxy for governance semantics.
Inference is fragile. Contracts are not.
All of this traced back to one limitation:
One workspace could publish only one app.
That meant a workspace had to choose:
There was no way to say:
So we encoded guarantees into duplication.
We were living proof.
When Org Apps became available in Microsoft Fabric, the announcement sounded small: Multiple apps per workspace.
But architecturally, it was the missing piece.
Because now a workspace no longer had to represent time.
Now the model became:
Same reports. \n Same logic. \n Different contracts.
Separation of concerns is the foundation of scalable systems - Herbert Simon.
This was separation finally done right.
Snapshots are not a reporting problem.
They are a distribution problem.
Org Apps let us express:
Snapshots stopped being places. \n They became explicit promises.
We didn’t have a snapshot strategy problem.
We had a platform that forced: Immutability to look like duplication.
Org Apps didn’t add convenience.
They corrected a modeling error that enterprise BI teams had been compensating for quietly.
If you’ve never had to preserve a report exactly as it was five years ago, this may sound academic.
If you have - you already understand the relief.
Org Apps didn’t make BI easier.
They made it honest.
And once snapshots stop pretending to be infrastructure, everything else finally gets lighter.
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