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

Optimizing dashboards

A Power BI dashboard lets users curate a collection of reports and visuals to show on a single page through an action called pinning. It is an easy way to create a customized view of the most important elements from different and potentially unrelated reports into a single dashboard. Dashboards in Power BI were designed to be fast and behave differently to reports because, where possible, they cache the query result and visual beforehand. This greatly reduces dashboard load time because it avoids most on-demand processing. Power BI does this by executing queries and preparing dashboard tiles when the underlying data has been updated.

Note

Visuals are cached when pinned to a dashboard, but reports (called live report tiles) are not. Therefore, we recommend only pinning individual visuals to dashboards instead of report pages to take advantage of caching.

There is also the potential to add significant background load on a system when using dashboards. This...