Forum Discussion
Replace a Long Text Key Field with an Integer
Hi Anonymous ,
Power BI is doing memory optimization automatically in the background (the VertiPaq engine uses dictionary encoding for long fields).
However, this doesn't cover the problem of sensitive keys. Therefore you'd have to implement this logic in the query editor and make sure that only the surrogate keys are loaded into the data model.
Thanks
As you told, it uses a dictionary encoding internally, but in this dictionary encoding, PowerBi still needs to retain all the text distinct values for the long field.
In this proposed way, PowerBi don't need to store this dictinct values, as we don't care the values, only the relationships between the tables, reducing filesize.
Regards!
True, but in the light of all the other improvements to be made, I doubt that this feature will get any priority without many votes for it in the idea section: https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas