Queries related to data size in Power Query Editor

Thankyou, jennratten, karansingla0311, for your response.

Hi coolsandeee,

We appreciate your inquiry on the Microsoft Fabric Community Forum.

Based on my understanding, Power Query Editor does not have a fixed row limit. The limit depends on the available system memory (RAM) and whether you are using a 64-bit or 32-bit version. For Power BI Desktop and On-Premises Data Gateway, the data size you can load and process depends on the RAM and available virtual memory on your machine.

The error message, "Evaluation ran out of memory and can't continue," indicates that the transformation—particularly the unpivot operation—exceeded the available memory during refresh. This is more likely to occur with large datasets (for example, 1 million rows) and when multiple refreshes run in parallel on a gateway machine with 16 GB RAM.

Kindly follow the steps below, which may help resolve the issue:

1. Optimize query steps by moving memory-intensive operations such as unpivoting upstream (at the source system or Power BI Dataflows). Reduce the dataset size before applying transformations by filtering or removing unnecessary columns.
2. Avoid running multiple heavy refreshes simultaneously on the same gateway.
3. Use Performance Monitor to check memory and CPU usage during refresh.
4. Consider increasing the Gateway RAM to 32 GB or more if you frequently run concurrent heavy refreshes.

If you find our response helpful, kindly mark it as the accepted solution and provide kudos. This will assist other community members facing similar issues.

Thank you.