Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Performance Best Practices

By : Bhavik Merchant
Book Image

Microsoft Power BI Performance Best Practices

By: Bhavik Merchant

Overview of this book

This book comprehensively covers every layer of Power BI, from the report canvas to data modeling, transformations, storage, and architecture. Developers and architects working with any area of Power BI will be able to put their knowledge to work with this practical guide to design and implement at every stage of the analytics solution development process. This book is not only a unique collection of best practices and tips, but also provides you with a hands-on approach to identifying and fixing common performance issues. Complete with explanations of essential concepts and practical examples, you’ll learn about common design choices that affect performance and consume more resources and how to avoid these problems. You’ll grasp the general architectural issues and settings that broadly affect most solutions. As you progress, you’ll walk through each layer of a typical Power BI solution, learning how to ensure your designs can handle scale while not sacrificing usability. You’ll focus on the data layer and then work your way up to report design. We will also cover Power BI Premium and load testing. By the end of this Power BI book, you’ll be able to confidently maintain well-performing Power BI solutions with reduced effort and know how to use freely available tools and a systematic process to monitor and diagnose performance problems.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Architecture, Bottlenecks, and Performance Targets
5
Part 2: Performance Analysis, Improvement, and Management
10
Part 3: Fetching, Transforming, and Visualizing Data
13
Part 4: Data Models, Calculations, and Large Datasets
17
Part 5: Optimizing Premium and Embedded Capacities

Chapter 8: Loading, Transforming, and Refreshing Data

So far, we have focused a lot on performance monitoring and investigation. We have now reached the next phase of our journey into Power BI performance management. Here, we will begin looking at what actions we can take to remedy the performance issues we discovered while using the tools that were introduced in previous chapters. From here on, each chapter will look deep at a specific area of a Power BI solution and will provide performance guidance. The first of these is loading data into Power BI.

Loading new data periodically is a critical part of any analytical system, and in Power BI, this applies to Import mode datasets. Data refresh and its associated transformations can be some of the most CPU and memory-intensive operations. This can affect user activities and cause refresh failures. Large datasets that occupy a significant portion of a host's memory, and that have complex data transformations, are more prone to...