Microsoft Power BI Performance Best Practices: A comprehensive guide to building consistently fast Power BI solutions

by Bhavik Merchant, Christopher Webb (Foreword by)

Overview

Supercharge Performance Analytics and create repeatable patterns to ensure you get the best performance and scalability from your analytics solutions with Power BI

• Get to grips with data modeling and Row Level Security
• Use DAX Studio/Vertipaq Analyzer to debug DAX and model-related performance problems and analyze exported desktop performance data
• Achieve performant designs using Power BI Solutions Cycle

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 implementation in 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 step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples and self-assessment questions, you'll learn about common design choices that affect performance and consume more resources and how to avoid these problems. You'll understand general architectural issues and settings that affect most solutions broadly. 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.

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.

• Understand how architecture settings and configuration affect scalability
• Build efficient Power BI reports and data transformations
• Explore best practices for data modeling, DAX, and working with large datasets
• Understand the inner workings of Power BI Premium
• Discover which metrics and tools you should use to identify and fix performance issues
• Retrieve and analyze diagnostic logs for native Azure Analysis Services offerings

Data analysts, BI developers, and data professionals who have learnt the basics of Power BI and now want to understand how to build advanced analytics solutions will find this business intelligence book useful. Familiarity with the major aspects of Power BI and a beginner-level understanding of their purpose and use cases are required.

1. Setting Targets and Identifying Problem Areas
2. Exploring Power BI Architecture and Configuration
3. DirectQuery Optimization
4. Analyzing Logs and Metrics
5. Desktop Performance Analyzer
6. Third-Party Utilities
7. Performance Governance Framework
8. Loading, Transforming, and Refreshing Data
9. Report and Dashboard Design
10. Data Modeling and Row Level Security
11. Improving DAX
12. High Scale Patterns
13. Power BI Premium/Embedded
14. Embedding in Web Apps
15. Capacity Planning and Load Testing

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781801076449
Publisher:	Packt Publishing
Publication date:	04/22/2022
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	7.50(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.65(d)

About the Author

Bhavik Merchant has nearly 18 years of deep experience in Business Intelligence. He is currently the Director of Product Analytics at Salesforce. Prior to that, he was at Microsoft, first as a Cloud Solution Architect and then as a Product Manager in the Power BI Engineering team. At Power BI, he led the customer-facing insights program, being responsible for the strategy and technical framework to deliver system-wide usage and performance insights to customers. Before Microsoft, Bhavik spent years managing high-caliber consulting teams delivering enterprise-scale BI projects. He has provided extensive technical and theoretical BI training over the years, including expert Power BI performance training he developed for top Microsoft Partners globally.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

1. Setting Targets and Identifying Problem Areas
2. Exploring Power BI Architecture and Configuration
3. DirectQuery Optimization
4. Analyzing Logs and Metrics
5. Desktop Performance Analyzer
6. Third-Party Utilities
7. Governing with a Performance Framework
8. Loading, Transforming, and Refreshing Data
9. Report and Dashboard Design
10. Data Modeling and Row-Level Security
11. Improving DAX
12. High-Scale Patterns
13. Optimizing Premium and Embedded Capacities
14. Embedding in Applications