Forum Discussion

ozancavus's avatar
ozancavus
Regular Visitor
10 years ago
Solved

Data capacity

Dear Power BI Community,   As a BI consultant I am experimenting with the functionalities of Power BI and even though I have no experience with Microsoft environment I can say that I am very impres...
  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    10 years ago

    ozancavus

    1. Say that an organization has 1 TB of sales data, how does Power BI deals with such cases where data is much larger 10 GB limit?

    The current path would be to have that data in a cube/model, Power BI can connect directly to that cube/model and not import the data.

    2. If it can handle data chunks that are larger than 10 GB, does it use Azure? Each workspace/group is limited to 10GB of which all the info already sits in Azure.

    3. If it can handle data chunks that are larger than 10 GB, how does it connects to local data sources such as an SQL database with data of 500 GBs? Direct Query to databases/cubes/models only queries the information, it doesn't import it.

     

    Direct Query methods send queries to your data source (Database, cube/model) - the size of those datasources is not a factor because you are not importing the data into Power BI.

  • ashishrj's avatar
    ashishrj
    10 years ago

    ozancavus The answer to all the queries is using Direct Query for supported data sources wherein data is not loaded into your Power BI Desktop model. It would be even great if you try importing data in SSAS model (tabular/multidimensional) and then create reports out of it ! But remember that direct query requires data sources connection to be always ON. 

    If SQL Server in Azure then the Azure VM / Azure Datawarehouse should not be paused / stopped. 

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    10 years ago

    ozancavus

    Take a look at the security white paper here it will answer many of the questions you may have surrounding how data is consumed/used.

    If you still have additional questions after reading that (download the white paper from that link) paper, we can pick it up from there.

     

ashishrj's avatar
ashishrj
Power Participant
10 years ago

ozancavus The answer to all the queries is using Direct Query for supported data sources wherein data is not loaded into your Power BI Desktop model. It would be even great if you try importing data in SSAS model (tabular/multidimensional) and then create reports out of it ! But remember that direct query requires data sources connection to be always ON. 

If SQL Server in Azure then the Azure VM / Azure Datawarehouse should not be paused / stopped. 

ozancavus's avatar
ozancavus
Regular Visitor
10 years ago

Dear Anonymous ashishrj,

 

Thank you for your replies! I understand that in order to show data that are larger than 10GB Power BI uses DirectQuery to connect to the DB and retreieves the result of the query and presents it wihile wihout consuming your 10G data limit.

 

My next questions are:

 

1. Where does Power BI Online stores the result of the query (say it returns 5 GB of data)? Does it stores it temporarily in some sort of cache memory that doesn't eat your data capacity?

2. What is the difference of having your (say 8GB) data being uploaded to the Power BI online or accessing it via DirectQuery to the DB? It came to my mind that it might take longer time to return the result of the query rather than showing it directly from the uploaded data, are there any other impacts?

 

Best

Ozan

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable
    10 years ago

    ozancavus

    Take a look at the security white paper here it will answer many of the questions you may have surrounding how data is consumed/used.

    If you still have additional questions after reading that (download the white paper from that link) paper, we can pick it up from there.

     

    • ozancavus's avatar
      ozancavus
      Regular Visitor
      10 years ago

      Dear Anonymous,

       

      Thank you for the document.

       

      Best

      Ozan