Forum Discussion
Best approach to split datasets and reports
It really comes down to what the business requires. If the data being made available for reporting purposes has crossover points then I would be looking to merge them together and filter out what's not useful so they are only working with information that can add value.
In my experience it comes down to what information needs to be displayed (does it cross themes? if so - merge it together), as well as the rate of refresh that will determine impacts server side.
As an extra note that I didn't cover before - having a single large dataset and allowing people to 'connect to the dataset' doesn't cause slowness in design/creation. This may be slightly wrong but it's my understanding the connected PBIX files does not store any of the data/transformation. That's done on the original PBIX file, and subsequent PBIX files that are connected are incredibly small (example: I have a 280mb file as my main dataset, but every connected PBIX file is less than 500kb). This also helps manage single source of truth which is a common business issue.
Thanks
I get your point, but for now I don't have much information about the reason some table are very big, but will investigate later to make sure that no data is being unnecessarily loaded !
Regarding your last point about having the same table many times, I would go even further by using data flows, which we are going to do ! This way, transformations will always be centralized.
Anyway, would any of you both be willing to provide a "summary" answer about my initial question (when to split datasets, when not to), so that I can validate it as a "good" answer, and maybe help other people in the future ?
Thanks to you both !
It really comes down to what the business requires. If the data being made available for reporting purposes has crossover points then I would be looking to merge them together and filter out what's not useful so they are only working with information that can add value.
In my experience it comes down to what information needs to be displayed (does it cross themes? if so - merge it together), as well as the rate of refresh that will determine impacts server side.
As an extra note that I didn't cover before - having a single large dataset and allowing people to 'connect to the dataset' doesn't cause slowness in design/creation. This may be slightly wrong but it's my understanding the connected PBIX files does not store any of the data/transformation. That's done on the original PBIX file, and subsequent PBIX files that are connected are incredibly small (example: I have a 280mb file as my main dataset, but every connected PBIX file is less than 500kb). This also helps manage single source of truth which is a common business issue.