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

Scaling with Azure Synapse and Azure Data Lake

Many data analytics platforms are based on a symmetric multi-processing (SMP) design. This involves a single computer system with one instance of an operating system that has multiple processors that work with shared memory, input, and output devices. This is just like any desktop computer or laptop we use today and extends to many server technologies too. An alternative paradigm is massively parallel processing (MPP). This involves a grid or cluster of computers, each with a processor, operating system, and memory. Each machine is referred to as a node.

In practical terms, consider computing a sum across 100 billion rows of data. With SMP, a single computer would need to do all the work. With MPP, you could logically allocate 10 groups of 10 billion rows each to a dedicated computer, have each machine calculate the sum of its group in parallel, and then add up the sums. If we wanted the results faster, we could spread the load further...