Forum Discussion
Helper IIIBasic question about properly planning reports and Data Refresh - how it is done in the industry
Hi arunbyc , thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Fabric Community Forum.
There are several courses in youtube one can learn from. Below are the links to the videos and Microsoft Learn Documentation that i recommend. :
You can find Microsoft doucumentation on almost everything PowerBI here:
1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/?wt.mc_id=powerbi_inproduct_settings
2. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/powerplatform/power-bi
For Individual Courses try these:
1. Learn Power BI: Tutorial for Beginners -Full Cours... - Microsoft Fabric Community
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyWVzAQF9YU
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDgyDXyu6FQ
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENZm_7jWU4Q
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MII8NIF98RM
6. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/refresh-data
7. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/service-gateway-onprem
8. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/data-integration/gateway/service-gateway-manage
9. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/data-integration/gateway/service-gateway-install
10. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/desktop-directquery-about
If this helps, please consider marking it 'Accept as Solution' so others with similar queries may find it more easily. If not, please share the details.
Thank you.
here is a good link to review your issue. It talks about publishing a semantic model (once) and connecting reports to that single source of truth to feed data in all reports. This, only haing to refresh the data in one model rather than each published report.
Connect to semantic models in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
arunbycBut don't most people simply use the import method? How do they all make the refresh less burdensome? Does making one most general datamodel, and having all my reports on different pages using only subsets of the tables and columns from this datamodel an option? Or does such an approach, though seems conceptually feasible, cause any practical problems? Or is what I am thinking not feasible at all?
Martin_DSolution Sage
Hi arunbyc ,
Anonymous proposed the correct approach. Having one semantic model that you use for multiple reports is still an import mode model, if you choose so. This will exactly solve your concern that you need many refreshes for many semantic models that send many queries to your database. With this approach you would only have nine queries per refresh, two fact tables and seven dimension tables, into one semantic model.This approach has additional technical advantages that are not so obvious to the report author:
- Having one data model for all reports means that the backend keeps only one cache for everyone which makes it more likely that a query hits the cache which gives you a faster user experience.
- Multiple semantic models also consume additional RAM each on the backend server, which, depending on the size of the semantic models, makes it more likely that Power BI starts swapping in and out semantic models from memory, also giving you a slower user experience.
So, my recommendation is also, load your 9 tables with all the columns you need in any report into one semantic model and use it for all your reports. If you have security concerns, that not everyone who gets access to some fileds should get access to all field you can also set up object level security to control access to columns by users, but that's an advanced feature.
Kind regrads,
Martin
- arunbyc
If we have a pro-license, does this live connection functionality come with it or do we have to subscribe or set up anything extra to get this running?