Azure Databricks slow Power Query Performance

[georgec96]

Hi All,

I am connecting to Azure Databricks using power bi (import mode) and my power query steps are sometimes extremely slow when doing merges, adding conditional columns etc. Tables I am importing are about few million rows.

Everytime I'm doing any step it feels like PowerBi has to read the table again and again.

Even simple queries as sorting takes a while. I was expecting import mode to be extremely fast as PowerBI would cache the table into memory.

Also I only have 8 GB of RAM, and a dual core CPU. Would that make a big impact on performance?

Thanks in advance.

[v-yalanwu-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi， @georgec96 ；

Power BI runs on memory. So the bigger the data set, the more memory it is going to require. Make sure you have plenty of memory, and that you are on a 64 bit system.

Before you dig into that though, let's take a look at a few of the local file settings in your PBIX file.
There are a few settings that you can turn off to help speed things up.
The background refresh is probably the most important one, but I turn all of these off for large data sets.

Might be also worth to check out task manager on your machine (CPU usage, Memory usage) see if you don't have any performance issues there.

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Power-BI-Desktop-IMPORT-data-limitation/m-p/466576

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Yalan Wu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.