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 some popular utilities that use different methods to analyze Power BI solutions and help us identify areas to improve. They are complementary to those provided by Microsoft and can enhance our optimization experience.

We learned that these tools are mature and have a broad range of functionality beyond performance improvement, so you are encouraged to explore all their features and consider incorporating them into your development cycle. One caveat is that free versions of these tools are often community projects and are not officially supported.

We learned about Power BI Helper and its ability to identify large columns, unused columns, bi-directional relationships, and measure dependencies. These are all candidates for performance improvement.

Next, we learned about Tabular Editor and its built-in BPA. This gave us an easy way to load in default rules provided by experts, then scan a dataset for a range of performance and other best...