AWS Bad Performance

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

I am connecting to AWS from a Quad Core Windows 2012 R2 Server with 30GB of ram and the Power BI Desktop performance is aweful. Any data changes made in the queries and I have to wait an Hour or more for the change to reflect.

I am currently looking at around 750k rows of data and this will increase over time.

Is there anything I can do to improve performance?

Thanks

[v-qiuyu-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

In Query Editor, many of data transformations operations will be performed against the underlying Amazon Redshift database, depending on whether such operations are supported by the backend or not. There is nothing obvious (like a setting) to change this behavior.

I would suggest to try a Reference table. For example if the source table is named Data, create a reference to it named DataSteps with the following query:

let
    Source = Data
in
    Source

When the DataSteps table is finished with all steps, then copy/paste the steps to the Data table.

Please run the Power BI desktop latest version on the same machine which runs Azure Redshift database, it can reduce network traffic effect. You can also consider using DirectoryQuery mode, see:

Use DirectQuery in Power BI Desktop

Building Power BI Reports on top of Amazon Redshift data

Best Regards,
Qiuyun Yu

[Anonymous]

I found deselecting Options>Data Load>Allow data to preview to download in the background has improved the peformance to a some what satisfactory level.