Desktop BI speed

[ammartino44]

Hello. I am going to be pulling data into three seperate HUUUUUGE CSV files (probably 500 mb in a power pivot model excel file). A couple of quesitons on performance. I want to test what it would be like to grab from databases and just having it automatically refreshed into power bi (I'm using SQL Express). So my plan is to upload these csv files and then grab them via SQL code. 

1) Does POWER BI handle data better than an excel file? 

2) Does grabbing things from SQL make it much easier to refresh your data? 

[v-micsh-msft]

Hi ammartino44,

Well this should be a large topic. Power BI is column based tool, while Excel is cell based, for handling data (regarding the data model) part, I think Excel is better. But for the report part, Power BI is much earlier to handle, and easy for sharing dashboards or reports.

Check the article regarding Choosing Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) tools for analysis and reporting.

Could you explain a bit regarding question 2, How would you refresh the data? And from where?

See the following article regarding data refresh on Power BI: Data refresh in Power BI.

If any further help needed, please feel free to post back.

Regards