Good afternoon!
I recently had a user create a composite model with one of our "enterprise" datsets. Got the person on a call and reviewed with him what he was trying to do: limit what was in the model to just the data in his Excel file. One of the first things he said was "I'm new to his role and to Power BI and have no idea what he was doing" 🙄 Googled and found instructions on how to create composite models and tried it out. To join data from the model to his Excel file:
- He created a concatenated field of Customer and Item from the fact table (about 586M records)
- Distinct values from #1 (about 92M records)
- Top 500 of those, which requires sorting those 92M records
He managed to auto-scale a P3 all by himself. Politely asked him to never do that again, and to contact me if he wanted some help with this in the future. But...this made my biggest fear come to fruition. We have a set of users who have been asking to combine data from multiple enterprise datasets (for example, "Sales" and "Inventory"). Merging those two models was always my nightmare scenario...and in reality, it took much less to make my fears come true.
We're exploring dataflows to provide the ability of users to pick and choose what data they want to pull into models, which seem promising. But we still have the problem of composite models. We've been able to get a count of about 150 composite models (defined as having both Import and Direct Query data sources) in our tenant. As best as I've been able to find, restricting composite models comes down to tenant-wide settings that allow this:
- Yes
- Yes, but only for certain users.
- No
Because we already have a fairly large number of composite models being used, we may not be able to just turn them off, or even restrict usage to certain users. Furthermore, for some things like real-time data, a composite model might be the only way to get what the users want.
All of that is background for my question: does anyone know if there is a way to restrict the ability to use specific datasets in a composite model. Where we would be able to somehow mark our "enterprise" datasets that would prevent users from creating a composite model with them? Anyone???
@parry2k @Greg_Deckler @amitchandak @AllisonKennedy
