Power BI and SQL Server Indexes

[Anonymous]

I've done some research without getting valuable information about my question.

I'm working on a data warehouse project and one my customer's requirement is that to use power bi pro for data visualisation.

What is not clear to me is if power bi, while acquiring data in its data model, would or not benefit from the indexing structure developed in SQL Server.

Thank you in advance for recommendation/tips on this subject.

[KHorseman · Accepted solution]

Indexes help with retrieval speed on the server end. The answer to how much it will help depends on the specifics of your situation. If you are doing a lot of data transformation and mashup in the Power BI query editor, indexes will only help where there is a step that selects rows from the sql server. It won't help with steps where the processing is being done on the Power BI end (such as merging with data from an Excel file or adding custom columns or some forms of substituting values). However, since you mention a data warehouse rather than a simple database, I'm going to assume you're barely doing any transformation on the Power BI end, relying instead on the server end to do the heavy lifting. In that case indexes will definitely help speed things up if they're done strategically.

That's a long way of saying "probably yes."