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

Avoiding pitfalls with row-level security (RLS)

RLS is a core feature of Power BI. It is the mechanism that's used to prevent users from seeing certain data in the dataset. It works by limiting the rows that a user can access in tables by applying DAX filter expressions.

There are two approaches to configuring RLS in Power BI. The simplest RLS configuration involves creating a role in the dataset, then adding members, which can be individual users or security groups. Then, DAX table filter expressions are added to the role to limit which rows members can see. A more advanced approach, sometimes referred to as dynamic RLS, is where you create security tables in the dataset that contain user and permission information. The latter is often used when permissions can change often, and it allows the security tables to be maintained automatically, without the Power BI dataset needing to be changed. We assume you are familiar with both approaches.

Performance issues can arise when...