Direct Query limitations on single row.

Going on over a week for us now and the support continues to struggle answering this issue and at this point I feel pretty helpless as they are clearly not knowledgable enough to troubleshooting it.

Initally they told me that a single row exceeds the 4MB limitation, at which I provided the stats from our db that this clearly is not the case. I also provided them trace routes for both the sql query and powerbi desktop. Now the latest statement from support is that :

Observations and Limitation:

It is identified that the max size limit is 4 MB for a Row however, alongside we also need to consider the overall size of the incoming data which should NOT exceed > 16 MB.

As per the stats shared by you below:

• 9,729 max bytes per row if every field is fully used ( ~ 0.009729 MB)
• 52,000 number of rows 
• 505,908,000 bytes is the total visual size  (~505.908 MB)

In Conclusion

• It is identified that the cap limit set is 16 MB and the report MB forecasted by you is ~505.908 MB which is greater than the threshold.
• I had a conversation with our PG for the latest update and understood that there has been a change on the limitation where the truncated data wasn’t throwing an error previously.
• This was not noticeable because, the data consumption happened by selecting a slicer which would have been always within limit of 4MB or 16 MB.
• In our latest bug which was raised for similar issue it is identified that, while extracting the data from SQL server using Direct Query we are seeing the error which you specified (Which was not the case earlier).

So essentially what it seems they are now telling me is that my report cannot be greater than 16MB. Which from my research is not true (and would be pathetic if it was). I do believe that they are confused with the limitations that exporting a report to excel would have (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/power-bi-visualization-export-data#limitations-and-considerations), but this is not the issue I am having at the moment.

Microsoft states that "Direct Query can have over 1GB datasets". This documentation can be found here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/desktop-use-directquery

The annoying part of all of this is that I will now have to wait another 24 hrs until the come back with yet another useless response.