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ML222's avatar
ML222
Frequent Visitor
3 years ago

Power BI Desktop Import Mode - Row Limitations Experienced

Hi,

 

Since there is "no limit" on the number of rows when importing, I am creating this thread as I am curious to see where Power BI Desktop starts to fall over when working with large imported data.

 

It would be great to know your experiences one the size of data you tried to work with and if Power BI Desktop was able to handle it. I will include system memory as well.

 

Rows imported on Fact: 92.5 Million

System: Azure Virtual Machine 

vCPU: 4

System Memory: 16GB

Outcome: Not great. Had to close all other applications to avoid "Memory Allocation Error". On the Data view, only 67K rows populated with the rest being blank on this view.

General Comment

3 Replies

  • v-yueyunzh-msft's avatar
    v-yueyunzh-msft
    Icon for Community Support rankCommunity Support
    3 years ago

    Hi , ML222 

    According to your description, you imported 92.5 Million data in Power BI, and you are using import mode, local import mode will indeed occupy a lot of CPU and memory on the computer, import mode will save all the data in the pbix file, and will load your data into memory for calculation when calculating.It depends on the performance of your computer.

    You can try to reduce unnecessary data import and optimize your data model,for this you can refer to :

    Data reduction techniques for Import modeling - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

     

    Thank you for your time and sharing, and thank you for your support and understanding of PowerBI! 

     

    Best Regards,

    Aniya Zhang

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

     

  • ML222's avatar
    ML222
    Frequent Visitor
    3 years ago

    Hi v-yueyunzh-msft ,

     

    Yes that is sort of what I am getting at. Not a question on will a large import make it difficult to use Desktop, this answer is obvious. But rather trying to figure out, from real experiences, what spec handles what amount of data in Desktop.

     

    • v-yueyunzh-msft's avatar
      v-yueyunzh-msft
      Icon for Community Support rankCommunity Support
      3 years ago

      Hi ,  ML222 

      I think you can perform a desktop data refresh and open the task manager in your local computer to check how much resource (memory/CPU) your Power BI desktop is consuming because this will directly show you the specific requirement of your Power BI desktop file needs.

       

       

       

      Thank you for your time and sharing, and thank you for your support and understanding of PowerBI! 

       

      Best Regards,

      Aniya Zhang

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