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

Spotting and mitigating performance issues

First, we will cover some recommended practices in working with Performance Analyzer to ensure you are comparing the same thing each time you test. This is important, so you should try to eliminate as many variables as possible and simulate the same conditions, whatever you can reasonably control.

Achieving consistency in tests

When you have a .pbix file open in Power BI Desktop, the dataset has already been loaded into memory. For import models, the file could be quite large, easily a few gigabytes (GB). You are likely to have noticed that Power BI Desktop takes longer to start up when opening a very large file. Much of this time is taken by the dataset being loaded from disk into memory. This concept applies in the Power BI service too, after you deploy datasets there.

The Power BI service does not keep all datasets in memory all the time. The service applies some heuristics to decide when to free up memory. If you haven&apos...