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

Capacity planning, monitoring, and optimization

A natural question that occurs when organizations consider purchasing Premium or Embedded capacity is what size to provision. We know that there are different services available in Premium and we can safely assume that workload intensity and distribution vary between organizations. This can make it difficult to predict the correct size based on simple metrics such as total users. Capacity usage naturally increases over time too, so even if you have the right size to begin with, there may come a point where you need to scale. Therefore, in the next few sections, you will learn about the initial sizing and then how to monitor and scale when necessary.

Determining the initial capacity size

Earlier in this chapter, we mentioned that Power BI capacities are available in varied sizes through different licensing models. We will assume that you will choose the appropriate Stock-Keeping Unit (SKU – that is, the unique product type...