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

Using query diagnostics

In Power BI Desktop, you can enable query diagnostics to get a detailed understanding of what each step of your query is doing. Even with seemingly simple queries that have few transformations, if performance is bad, you will need to know which part is slowing you down so that you can concentrate your optimization efforts. Diagnostics needs to be enabled in the Power Query settings, as shown in the following screenshot. You might not need all the traces that are shown in the following screenshot. At a minimum, enable the Aggregated diagnostics level and Performance counters:

Figure 8.12 – Query Diagnostics enabled in the Power Query settings

There are up to four types of logs that are available:

  • Aggregated: This is a summary view that aggregates multiple related operations into a single log entry. The exclusive durations are summed per entry.
  • Detailed: This is a verbose view with no aggregation. It is recommended for...