Measures in desktop vs in SSAS

[anandfarmers]

Hi,

I have a SSAS Tabular model that is used by our organisation. The Power BI reports are published to in-house PBI Reporting Server (PBIRS). The PBI reports connect to the SSAS Tabular model.

My question:

Is there a performance difference in writing the measures for the SSAS model in PBI vs as part of the Tabular model?

That is the data will be in the model and the measures will be in PBI file.

I am just converned only about performance.

I understand it is not best practice to have the measures in PBI since it is local to that file. Having it in the Tabular model will make it available to all users.

But will there be any performace difference of the measures?

[v-tianyich-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @anandfarmers ,

It seems to be the difference between report level measure and normal measure, in terms of performance, there is no difference, it mainly depends on the size and complexity of the data. On the other hand, report-level measure values are created for live connections to Power BI datasets published in SSAS Tabular or Services. This means that the measure is available throughout the report, not just in the specific visualization in which it was created. As a result, the performance of report-level measure can be affected by network latency and data source performance.

Hope it helps!

Best regards,
Community Support Team_ Scott Chang

If this post helps then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[anandfarmers]

Thank you @v-tianyich-msft .

Network latency is a good point.

[amustafa]

Sharing two blog posts to help you with your questions. My preference would be to do as much as you can in SSAS tabular model.

Choosing to Model in Power BI vs SSAS Tabular (pragmaticworks.com)

Doing Power BI the Right Way: 5. Data Modeling Essentials & Best Practices (1 of 2) – Paul Turley's ...

[anandfarmers]

Thanks @amustafa.

Yes, having the measures in model is my optimal.

I am trying understand about performance impact of having measures in PBI vs in SSAS Tabular model.

[amustafa]

Thank you for the Kudo @anandfarmers 

I have never benchmarked the performance between the two. I always give preference to scalibility and usability. My life is much easier if I have a good model in SSAS because users may ask to use other downstream applications and it saves me time then I have to worry about performance. I tweak the tabular model as much I can on source side 🙂