Shared Master Data Model Performance?

[Michaelbean21]

Hi there I was wondering if anyone knew how PowerBi report performance was is affected when building a new report from a "Master Model" within your organization.

For instance instead of copying the same model for every report we build and then having to go make the same update 10 times we are wanting to use one master data model and have that sit in the PowerBi service.  Then using the "Data hub" feature in PowerBi build any new reports off of the same model so that all reports are consistent.

However I noticed that it forces it to be pulled in by Direct Query mode which makes sense, but all the best practices I have read say that direct query slows down report performance.  But this seems to be indiciatin gif you are pulling the data from another source other than an internal PowerBi service model.

Need to know if this direct query to an imported master data model will still cause performance issues.

Lineage example below: (Connection to the master dataset is Snowflake just hiding our address for security).

[GilbertQ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Michaelbean21 

The DirectQuery just means that it will always get the data from the master model.

In Power BI the master model is an in memory database which caches the queries, so when users are using the same report it will get the results from the query cache, which is very fast and does not impact performance.

I for example have a client that has got one master database that has got over 100 reports connected and they all run very fast.

I would highly recommend going with the master model approach it works well and it is fast.

[Michaelbean21]

Thank you so much for the quick answer on this, search the entire internet for hours and could find nothing even remotely answering this question!