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

Reaching on-premises data through gateways

The on-premises data gateway provides a secure communications channel between on-premises data sources and various Microsoft services, including Power BI. These cloud services include Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, Azure Analysis Services, and Azure Logic Apps. Gateways allow organizations to keep sensitive data sources within their network boundaries on-premises and then control how Power BI and users can access them. The gateway is available in both Enterprise and Personal versions. The remainder of this section focuses on the Enterprise version.

When a gateway is heavily loaded or undersized, this usually means slower report loading and interactive experiences for users. Worse, an overloaded gateway may be unable to make more data connections, which will result in failed queries and some empty report visuals. What can make matters worse is that users' first reaction is often to refresh the failed report, which can add even...