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 introduced Performance Analyzer as a built-in tool to help you assess performance for every report user action, on a per-visual basis. It breaks visual processing into query, visual, and other components to help you focus on your performance tuning efforts. It also provides durations and other metrics to help you assess behavior. It lets you copy DAX and DQ queries for analysis in other tools. You can also export the whole performance log file for analysis.

We learned about the types of user actions that the analyzer captures and what metrics it provides in the user interface. We also pointed out some scenarios that can make it difficult to distinguish actions.

Next, we covered some good practices for performance testing in Power BI Desktop, such as using blank report pages, ensuring consistency in tests, and trying to replicate production scenarios as closely as possible. We learned that even if we optimized performance a lot in Desktop, it may not...