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sci66
Regular Visitor

PowerBI basics, dataset size on disk, in memory.

Hello Everyone.

 

New to PowerBI. I am trying to determine what kind of PowerBI premium account we will need to purchase. I have a dataset that shows that it is 3.6gb in size. 

 

1) How do I find out what is the size of my report.

2) how do I find out how much ram 3.6gb of data set + report will will consume when it gets loaded in memory for end user to consume.

3) how much RAM does each user interaction take.

4) how much does PBIX dashboard expand in memory, what is ration of on disk vs on RAM.

4) I notice that when dashboard first gets loaded it takes little while, I am assuming it is getting loaded in RAM, how can I pre-load dashboard.

5) How to determine what kind of Premium capacity you will require based on your dashboard. Is there online calculator? 

 

 

 

3 REPLIES 3
sci66
Regular Visitor

Thanks for reply few follow-up question.

 

1) What was your PBIX size on disk that came up to 303.23MB in RAM.

 

2) I am coming from Qlik background and when we refresh dashboard we get 1 qlik file to update. However in PBI, I see that dataset is seperate then Report & Dashbord. In this case if we refresh dataset do Report & Dashboard gets updated automatically? 

 

3) If you buy premium per capcacity. $20k gives you 100GB of RAM, is that enough. If you have 5X20GB dashboard on disk, once they expand in RAM it will eat up all the memory. Currently with Qlik we have phycial server where memory is scaled up 512GB ram which can allow us to carry lot more dashboards in memory at much cheaper price. 

 

4) what are must have tools you need to install from Developer point of view & from Capacity Admin point of view.

 

5) I find central job management in PBI to be mediocore compare to Qlik. It does not have central interface which shows all the job, its run time, ability to view logs for things that failed. 

 

 

I am trying to understand concept before we make leap in PBI world. 

selimovd
Super User
Super User

Hey @sci66 ,

 

there are just 2 options with Premium. Either your company is using a premium capacity, what starts at 4'995 USD per month. Or you take a Premium per User License what is 20 USD per month per user. This is then including the Pro license (10 USD). So you pay 20 USD instead of 10 USD.

 

Concerning your questions:

1. The size of your .PBIX file

2. Open DAX Studio and connect it to your PBIX file. Go to Advanced --> View Metrics and then to the summary tab. There you see the size in the RAM:

selimovd_0-1622977757617.png

 

 

3. Once the model is loaded the RAM doesn't change much.

 

4a. That depends very much on your data. If the values in your data is repeated many times, the compression is higher. For monitoring reports, where the same error messages appear again and again the compression can easily be 30-60 x. If you prepare your data in a bad way, e.g. keep transactions with milliseconds, there will not be a big aggregation, so not a big compression. Microsoft once said in average the compression is 15x. But as I said that depends very much on your data and the way you prepare the data.

 

4b. Open them once in a while, then the reports and dashboards are in the cache.

 

5. As said at the beginning, there is just premium for the whole company or premium per user. Then the datasets can become 100GB and above.

 

If you need any help please let me know.
If I answered your question I would be happy if you could mark my post as a solution ✔️ and give it a thumbs up 👍
 
Best regards
Denis
 

Another question. I cannot open 3.5gb PBIX file on my laptop on PowerBI (not enough memory) if that is the case then how can I evaluate with Dax Studio, is there a way you can do this via PBIX service?

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