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

Summary

In this chapter, we have come closer to the end of our journey of performance optimization in Power BI. We focused on reserved capacities that are available as Power BI Premium and Embedded offerings. We learned that you could purchase and license the offerings differently, but that they share most functionality across SKUs. This means that the same performance optimization guidance applies to capacities consistently.

We introduced Power BI Premium and covered the unique features it offers that help with performance and scaling large datasets. Then, we introduced Gen2, which is the latest and now default offering from Microsoft. Since Gen2 is Generally Available, we did not cover the previous generation due to huge improvements in design and reduced maintenance. After that, we took a brief look at capacity settings such as query timeouts and refresh intervals, which you can use to prevent expensive operations from severely affecting the capacity.

Then, we discussed how...