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dbadmin's avatar
dbadmin
Icon for Advocate V rankAdvocate V
10 years ago

Power BI's In-memory store - for clarification purposes... how does it work exactly?

I am part of our company's R&D, also the report author for a different part of the company.    I have been researching how to create a reporting database instead of trying to run reports through ou...
TealCanady's avatar
TealCanady
Icon for Advocate II rankAdvocate II
10 years ago

dbadmin

So you do have the concept down but there are a variety of factors which would lead you to making a datawarehouse / tabular model as opposed to doing it directly in Power BI desktop. Data size is going to be the big one (how much RAM is being consumed); also allowing a file into the wild at your organization with 50 people hitting refresh from production could be a nightmare. You can mitigate some of these issues with One Drive being your go to and refreshing hourly to the online portal; but what I would personally be concerned with is permissions and size vs. your client computers. In addition many users prefer Excel to the desktop power bi (while these features are also available in Excel it can be difficult if your user base has many versions of Excel).

The in memory engine is called Vertipaq and was originally aquired by Microsoft in 2010 (I think). This has been available in Excel since that time. Follow the link above for some more information on the engine.

 

Cheers,

 

Teal Canady

  • dbadmin's avatar
    dbadmin
    Icon for Advocate V rankAdvocate V
    10 years ago

    TealCanady and Anonymous

     

    The benefit of our setup is we WON'T have 50 users needing data on a daily basis. In reality only a select few will need to access the reports. We would like to display a dashboard on a large monitor on the factory floor with "live" data - in reality this will be updated about every 5 minutes.

     

    I discovered a tool called Power Update that is supposed to work in refreshing Power BI but I haven't gotten it to work quite well.

     

    In this sense - I guess our best option IS going to be to have a separate reporting database. I have been in the progress of researching HOW to do that exactly. We are using Postgres databases - so I'm trying to figure out how to automate the refresh processes between the two. 

     

    This was helpful information. Thank you so much - I just wanted to see what our options are and see it would be beneficial in our case to eliminate some steps, but I don't think it will be in this case. Thanks so much for the input and advice! :)