Power BI as operational reporting

[ame54]

Have a use-case currenlty in our company where we are trying Power BI as a tool for operational reporting, most of our reports currently are built on QlikView & Sense.

We are in the process of migrating from one CRM system to a new one, and need to have operational reports that show data from both systems at the same time.

Currently we are trying Power BI with direct query, connecting to one DB source, and creating views with a linked server query to the other data source.

We are still in early phases, so have not fully stressed Power BI limitation on this matter.

Does anyone have experience with a similer use case?

Or experience on limitations we will face with Direct Query from data modeling perspective or performance perspective.

[TDouglassAFG]

Hi,

I was just wondering on your approach to this.  Did you have a data model built against the ERP structures will all the transactions (versus a star schema approach for analytics)?  Did you denormalize any of it? Or was it just live connect to the operational data and any joins were done in the reports?

Tina

[v-yuezhe-msft · Accepted solution]

@ame54,

Please take a look at the following articles about limitations in DirectQuery mode and how to optimize data model in DirectQuery mode.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-directquery-about
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/power-bi-reports-performance

Regards,
Lydia