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 paginated reports

Paginated reports in Power BI use the mature SSRS technology. A paginated report implements the XML-based Report Definition Language (RDL) to define reports. They are known as pixel-perfect, referring to the fact that they are designed with printing in mind. They are designed with a pre-determined page size (often a standard letter or A4), and the designer will lay out elements exactly where they need to appear on a page by specifying element sizes. They are very good at handling operational-style reports with many rows and pages, such as a group of sales invoices, by providing features such as page headers, footers, and margins. The designer often does not know how many pages the report will generate, as more content simply overflows to a new page. Paginated reports have a dedicated authoring tool called Power BI Report Builder.

Paginated reports can use relational or analytical data sources, which can be hosted in the cloud or on-premises. The latter...