Forum Discussion
1GB Limit Explained
Just to expand and clarify on Q1.
When you click "close and apply" the data is stored in RAM. When you click SAVE to save your pbix file the data from RAM is written into the .pbix file (and conversely loading a PBIX reads the all data from disk and loads it into RAM). Technically you will also see some temp files used when you click "close and apply", but those are never permanently stored anywhere.
Note that the size of the data stored inside the pbix file is likely to be slightly smaller than the memory footprint as there are some objects like dictionaries that are stored uncompressed in memory, but have additional compression applied when writing them to disk. And your pbix includes the metadata for your report visuals (the blog Frank linked to breaks down the structure of a pbix file).
Hi Anonymous ,
Q1.
For import, all the data are stroed on premise. So it is safe to say that all the data are stored in disk. You can refer to the bolg to know about what makes up a pbix to help you understand that.
Q2.
Also the blog , that means the file size should not be more that 1 GB. So this mean 1GB to disk.
Regards,
Frank
Just to expand and clarify on Q1.
When you click "close and apply" the data is stored in RAM. When you click SAVE to save your pbix file the data from RAM is written into the .pbix file (and conversely loading a PBIX reads the all data from disk and loads it into RAM). Technically you will also see some temp files used when you click "close and apply", but those are never permanently stored anywhere.
Note that the size of the data stored inside the pbix file is likely to be slightly smaller than the memory footprint as there are some objects like dictionaries that are stored uncompressed in memory, but have additional compression applied when writing them to disk. And your pbix includes the metadata for your report visuals (the blog Frank linked to breaks down the structure of a pbix file).
Hey d_gosbell ,
Thanks for expanding on Q1. The whole reason for these questions is due to wanting to find as much information as possible, more towards the finer details and you certainly assisted on that.
I undertand that when we click ‘Close and Apply’ that Power Query loads the data into our Model. I also undertand that when clicking ‘save’ that the PBIX file saves to disk.
The connection that you made for me was that once you close a PBIX file, the data is cleared from memory and once you open the PBIX file, the data is once again loaded to memory for querying the data.
Also, after reading the blog that was shared by v-frfei-msft it was recommended to read more about Vertipaq Engine which is what I will be doing in order to get much deeper into the details.
Thanks,
Laz
Yes, the whole memory size vs disk size can be confusing.
And it actually gets measured differently in different parts of Power BI. For example the 1GB model limit in Power BI Pro is based on the size of the pbix file (mainly because that is easy for the user to measure)
Whereas if you have a Power BI Premium capacity of 16Gb that is the total amount of memory that models can use when loaded into RAM (although premium capacities can also unload models from RAM that have not been used recently so the total size of all your models can exceed 16 Gb)...