PowerBI Performance Management Best Practices?

[residentx]

I have some peformance questions about PowerBI. These questions related to the global settings:

Q1: Why the 4096 limit? Even Excel 32 bit can go higher than this...

Q2: Privacy Level? Does fast combine still exist and is there a way to measure the performance impact?

Q3: Why allow parameterization in data source and transformations dialogs? Will this hurt performance?

Q4: Parallel loading of tables? I've stopped using this because I want each table job to finish before I move on to another.

Has anyone else disabled this? I've disabled this because large datasets would not import completely.

Q5: What restrictions are there now for measures now in directquery mode now? I have not been a huge fan of directquery in practice.

[Greg_Deckler · Accepted solution]

A1: To what 4096 limit are you referring, visuals, data cache limit?

A2: Fast Combine ignores privacy level: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-refresh-enable-fast-combine/

A3: Because users requested that feature in Ideas, I think their reasoning says it best:

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/7141377-allow-runtime-parameters-...

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/search?oauth_consumer_key=plilavrIh84mco2CxZU...

You can turn this off.

A4: I have not disabled it and have not seen any issue but it does clearly state that parallel loading can "occasionally degrade performance or reliability"

A5: You can turn on unrestricted measures for DirectQuery now.

[residentx]

A1: To what 4096 limit are you referring, visuals, data cache limit? Data Cache

A5: You can turn on unrestricted measures for DirectQuery now. I'm not really a fan of tabular or directquery.

Thanks for the reply smoupre

[residentx]

Smoupre,

Can we talk about this further. The September update is out and I have more questions.

1. Data Load/Data Cache Management -> I thought PowerBI was 64bit why the 32 bit limit(4GB)?

   

2. Query Editor/Parameters -> Why always allow parameterization in data source and transformation dialogs?

3. DirectQuery/What is DirectQuery? How can I test/confirm if I have access to this? Should I allow “unrestricted” measure?Security/What is the difference between a new database query and a new native database query?

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