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

Configuring for faster DirectQuery

There are a few settings that can be adjusted in Power BI to speed up DirectQuery datasets. We will explore these next.

Power BI Desktop settings

In the Power BI Desktop options, there is a section called Published dataset settings (as shown in Figure 3.6). The highlighted area shows the setting that controls how many connections per data source can be made in parallel. The default is 10. This means no matter how many visuals are in a report, or how many users are accessing the report in parallel, only 10 connections at a time will be made.

If the data source can handle more parallelism, it is recommended to increase this value before publishing the dataset to the Power BI service. However, with very busy data sources, you may find overall performance can improve by reducing the value instead. This is because too many parallel queries can overwhelm the source and result in a longer total execution time. A lower value means some queries will...