Adding Column Indexes - how does this help?

[Anonymous]

It's very easy to create a column index in Power Query or Power BI Desktop, but I'm not sure what advantages they confer.

When I used to work on large DB2 or Oracle systems, if searches were slow, asking a DBA to add an Index was the usual solution (quite how it all worked was of no concern to anyone but the DBAs)

Now in Power BI I can create a column index easily,

.... but all this gives me is a numbered index column for each row:

How does this improve performance? Am I missing something?

And why should anyone use a Custom Index, which just seems to complicate things?

Thanks for your help!

[v-juanli-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous 

In Power BI, Index can't improve performace as index does in DB.

Index would be needed in many scenario, for example, numbering grouped data in Power Query.

To improve Performace, you could refer to the following article.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/power-bi-reports-performance

https://www.sqlbi.com/articles/introducing-the-power-bi-performance-analyzer/

Best Regards
Maggie

Community Support Team _ Maggie Li
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.