Data Size of SharePoint List is Very Large

[davisn]

Dear Power BI Community Members,

I am connecting to a SharePoint Online list via Power BI Desktop. The list contains about 9,000 records with Lookup Columns. When I load the list into Power BI Desktop, the load size is over 20MB. I would consider this to be very large consider the amount of data.

Does anyone know what is happening/what is loading, that causes this to be so large?

Thank you,

[simplimitch]

Hi davisn,

I have found that by default the SharePoint Online function uses the new REST api to gather the data which from my experience is as you say actually quite slow.

What we have done is actually use the listdata.svc instead which the performance is much quicker.

The URL you would use is https://yourtenant.sharepoint.com/anysubsite/_vti_bin/listdata.svc/ListName

This will return you the items within that list, it isn't anywhere near as fast as something list SQL Server but it should take minutes not hrs to return.

[alexandrumm]

I have the exact same problem and I'm sure Power BI does at least the number of additional queries per item as lookup columns you have in the list. For me it takes hours to get items from a list with <5000 items.