Using PBI Desktop to pull transformed data from published models?

[Shure846]

Hi - I've got a report that has too many transformations/merges in it for it to automatically refresh in PBI (times out). I've taken the large majority of the merges, and offloaded it to another model that I published. 

How can I connect my previous report to that model's transformed/merged data so that it's not attempting to do the work in the pre-existing report?

Thanks in advance~ 

[audreygerred]

From Power BI desktop you can connect to a semantic model published to service by clicking Get Dat and selecting Power BI semantic model. May I ask, how large is your model? Is it a star schema or did you merge a lot of tables to create one large denormalized table?

[Shure846]

I had 1 specific merge that when implemented was causing the auto-refresh to time out, so I backed it out of my main report. My question also asking to understand if I use that semantic table if it's pulled the transformed data, or if it's it's going to to try the do the transformations that I moved to the new model. 

I've got about 5GB of CSV files that I'm working on, with other smaller tables that I'm pulling data into, so it's a semi-star (if that's a thing). 

I've tried connecting to the model in the desktop app, but I can't figure out how/if I can connect to two models and append their data together. 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Thanks for the solution audreygerred offered, and i want to offer some more information for user to refer to.

hello @Shure846 , if you connect to the  semantic model, the connection mode is live connection, in this mode, you cannnot edit the data model or data, if you want to append the data, it is better that you export the data to an excel, then import the data in Power BI Desktop, you can refer to the following link about the semantic model.

Connect to semantic models in the Power BI service from Power BI Desktop - Power BI | Microsoft Lear...

Best Regards!

Yolo Zhu

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