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 9: Report and Dashboard Design

In the previous chapter, we looked at how to load data into Power BI efficiently to reduce system resource use and reduce the amount of time taken to load data. Slow data refreshes generally do not impact a user's report performance experience directly because they usually occur in the background and are scheduled at off-peak times.

Now, we will shift our focus to the visual layer of Power BI. Here, inappropriate choices can directly affect the end user experience, from both a performance and usability perspective. While we will continue to focus on design patterns that improve performance, we will point out when performance guidance can also improve usability.

In this chapter, we will learn how the Power BI visual framework works within reports and how these relate to queries and engine load. This will give us fundamental knowledge on report behavior, which will help identify what to optimize. We will then go through a range of common...