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asad_mohamed
New Member
4 years ago
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Efficient Snowflake Metadata Interrogation by Power BI

When Power BI connects to Snowflake using a credential that has access to many roles (more than 25) vs. another credential that has fewer roles (less than 5), the response time is significantly poorer (3x to 10x slower)


We have learned that Power BI is exhaustively examining all the roles and their security allowances, before doing the work of the query.


Other tools - Tableau, Business Objects, do this without this extreme overhead. They simply evaluate if the current role can run the current query and let the database backend be the gatekeeper.


As a result - Snowflake, which is orders of magnitude faster than traditional on-prem databases, ends up being slower in Power BI


Suggestion: Let the backend database do the security reconciliation. Streamline Power BI's examination of role metadata to do what Power BI competitors do before running the query

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