The team at SQLBits have been publishing all the session recordings from their last (online) conference on their YouTube channel. There’s a lot of great content there to check out and this post is to highlight one of my sessions, “Performance tuning Power BI dataset refresh”.
In this session I look at all of the factors that can influence how long it takes to import data into Power BI and what you can do to make it faster. Topics covered include:
- Choosing a dataset storage mode
- The importance of good data modelling
- How the type of data source you use effects how quickly data can load
- Ways to measure refresh performance, such as using SQL Server Profiler and Power Query Query Diagnostics
- Power Query options that can influence refresh times such as disabling data previews
- Query folding in the Power Query engine
- Vertipaq engine features that affect refresh, such as calculated columns and calculated tables
- How dataflows can help refresh performance