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Nolock's avatar
Nolock
Resident Rockstar
5 years ago

Registry key for disabling time intelligence

Hello,   I'd like to ask if somebody knows a registry key for disabling the time intelligence for new files. Or is there another way how to distribute Power BI Desktop with the disabled time inte...
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Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
5 years ago

Hi Nolock,

AFAIK, this option is a global setting option, it will affect the default power bi desktop options. (notice: this option does not change the table Date fields that already analytic by auto date/time feature, you need to rebuild these tables)

You can take at the following document to know more about this:

Apply auto date/time in Power BI Desktop 
Regards,

Xiaoxin Sheng

Nolock's avatar
Nolock
Resident Rockstar
5 years ago

Hello Anonymous,

thank you for your answer, but it didn't take me further.

The problem is that the time intelligence is a big mess. You don't want to have an extra date dimension table written in DAX for every date/datetime column in your model. AFAIK it is not compressed by the Vertipaq engine and it consumes a lot of memory. You also can't add new levels to the hierarchy or remove the existing ones.

I always recommend using a date dimension written in M, like this one for example: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Community-Blog/Date-Dimension-with-Holidays-in-PowerQuery/ba-p/745999

 

I'm going to distribute PBI Desktop to hundreds of users and it is not possible to explain everybody that they should deactivate this feature. Therefore I'm searching for an option how to disable the setting globally in advanced.

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable
    5 years ago

    Hi Nolock,

    In fact, I think this is a compromise chose to balance the performance and practicality.
    If you enable this feature, it will generate corresponding personal date dimensions to add support of time intelligence functions and improve the performance of chart field aggregations. 

    The performance issue will appear when you are processing with huge amount of records or complex report structure.
    So I'd think the major point is how to improve this feature instead of removing it, right?
    If this is a case, I'd like to suggest you submit an idea to improve this feature to reuse these hidden date dimension fields instead of generating multiple fields, it should reduce the cost of using this feature.

    Regards,

    Xiaoxin Sheng