Optimizing guide for Power BI

Optimizing Guide for Power BI allows developers and administrators to produce and maintain optimized Power BI solutions. Also, you can optimize your solution at different architectural layers. These layers include –

• The data source(s)
• The data model
• Visualizations, that includes dashboards, Power BI reports, and Power BI paginated reports
• The environment, that includes capacities, data gateways, and the network

Optimizing Guide for the Data model

The data model supports the entire visualization experience. There are two types of data models – External-hosted, as well as Internal-hosted, referred to as datasets. Now, it is very crucial to understand your options and to choose the appropriate dataset type for your solution. Primarily, there are three dataset modes – Import, DirectQuery, and Composite.

Optimizing Guide for visualizations

The Power BI visualizations can be dashboards, Power BI reports, or Power BI paginated reports. Such that each has different architectures, and so each has its own guidance.

• Firstly, Use Dashboard: It is critical for you to understand that Power BI maintains a cache for your dashboard tiles—except live report tiles, and streaming tiles. Therefore, when you pin live report tiles to a dashboard, they’re not served from the query cache. Instead, they behave like reports, and make queries to back-end cores on the fly.
• Secondly, Use, Power BI reports: There are several recommendations for optimizing Power BI report designs such as – applying the most restrictive filters, limit visuals on report pages, and evaluate custom visual performance.
• Lastly, Use Power BI paginated reports: The designs created can be optimized by applying best practice design to the report’s data retrieval. Also, make sure your capacity has sufficient memory allocated to the paginated reports workload.

Optimizing Guide for the environment

For optimizing the Power BI environment you can configure capacity settings, sizing data gateways, and reducing network latency.

• Capacity settings: Firstly, when using capacities that are available with Power BI Premium (P SKUs), or Power BI Embedded (A SKUs, A4-A6) you can manage capacity settings.
• Gateway sizing: Secondly, a gateway is needed when Power BI must access data that is not accessible directly over the Internet. Moreover, you can install the on-premises data gateway on a server on-premises, or VM-hosted Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).
• Network latency: It can impact report performance by increasing the time required for requests to reach the Power BI service, and for responses to be delivered. Also, tenants in Power BI are assigned to a particular region.