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 saw how the two storage modes in Power BI work. Import mode datasets create a local in-memory cache of the data in Power BI. DirectQuery mode datasets pass queries through to external data sources. Generally, Import mode is the fastest because it is local to Power BI, in-memory, a column-based database, and compresses data to make working with it more efficient. However, DirectQuery mode provides a way to always have the latest data returned from the source and avoid managing data refreshes. It also allows you to access very large datasets that are far beyond the capacity available in Power BI Premium. In this way, there is a trade-off between these two modes. However, Power BI also provides composite models that blend Import and DirectQuery for very good performance gains.

You have also learned the role of on-premises gateways for enterprises to allow Power BI to connect securely with on-premises data sources. Gateways host Power BI's mashup engine...