Forum Discussion

Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
6 years ago

What is the proper use case for Dataflows

My organization is fairly new to Power BI, and I'm not 100% sure we are trying to use Dataflows how they're intended.  For instance, we have a star schema and want to consume that data through Power ...
Greg_Deckler's avatar
Greg_Deckler
Icon for Community Champion rankCommunity Champion
6 years ago

Anonymous - So, in general Dataflows were created by Microsoft to make queries reuseable. So, originally, if you had 5 Power BI PBIX files you might have the same query and transformation in each one. So, if a change happened to the source data and you needed to make adjustments you ended up having to modify all 5 PBIX files. Dataflows allowed you to have a single place to make modifications and you could use that dataflow within your PBIX files.

 

So, that's the original intent of dataflows or what they originally brought to the table. Now, if you have having issues with the size of your datasource, you have 2 options.

1. See if you can implement incremental refresh

2. Move to Direct Query

 

If you move to Direct Query dataflows are basically out of the picture unless you do the preview thing where you direct query to a dataflow but that's kind of a different thing.

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable
    6 years ago

    Greg_Deckler  - Thanks for the advice.  Are you saying there is an incremental refresh option for the dataset?  I know of the incremental refresh option for dataflows, but the dataflows refresh fine.  We only run into memory issues when we attempt to refresh the dataset built from the dataflows.

     

    We enabled the enhanced compute engine and tried directquery against the dataflows themselves.  We ended up using about 1/3 of the tables with directquery and 2/3 dataflows and still exceeded our memory.  We may just switch it over to directquery against DB2 and see how that works.