Limits when using Power BI REST API and/or Azure Stream Analytics

[aevers]

Hi all,

since i had a lot of questions when i started using the Power BI REST API and writing records from Azure Stream Analytics i think the answers i got might be of interest to anyone running into the same problems i had. After knowing about those limits it was pretty easy for me to handle those accordingly.

• There is limit of 120 POST rows requests per minute.
• There is limit of 10K rows per POST rows request.
• There is limit of 1M rows added per hour.
• ASA sends rows to PBI FIFO tables, which are limited to storing last 200K rows added to them.
• PBI FIFO datasets are currently limited to 250Mb in size.
• The same is true for REST API calls

I also had a problem of degrading performance over time which was related to the fact that the insert performance degrades the larger the table gets. Therefore rows inserted into Power BI FIFO tables should be less than 1kb to avoid performance issues:

• Problem with use case is large row size. It causes large dataset size, which in turn causes poor performance of row add operations
• Adding new rows will start failing after dataset reaches 250Mb in size. I’ve provided 1K row size as example of row that will produce 1K*200K = 200Mb dataset, which barely fits under 250Mb limit.
• There is currently no limit on individual row size.
• Making FIFO table data size-limited instead of row count-limited is currently not supported.
• After about 1K rows, POST rows latency starts increasing linearly with number of rows added.

I hope to have saved someone a lot of time debugging when running into the same problems! 🙂

Best

Axel

[RomanKiss]

Hi Axel.

Thanks for this info.

In addition, there is one more critical limitation for Power BI REST API service such as maximum 5 pending POST requests per dataset.

I hope this limitations will be updated soon to enable better performace for pushing data do the dataset in the real-time without any degrading of performance on the pusher side.

For example, in my POC project was neccessery slow down pusher (subscriber) of the Azure Service Bus for slowly reading the topic messages and pushing them to the Power BI Service, otherwise there was a many bad responses (429) from the PBI Service. It supprise me this limitation on the Azure platform and I hope this is just only temporary.

Thanks

Roman

[ashishrj]

@aevers You can also find more about Power BI REST API here.

Note: Session starts after 30 minutes. You will find wokring of REST API with CRM Online as a data source and also its advantages and limitations