Online Service Functionality in Power BI

[Budfudder]

I'm guessing everybody's familiar with the behaviour of the Content Packs and how, when you connect to a data source through them, they automatically produce a whole slew of visualizations and analytics.

Our problem is that our data source (actually a CRM instance) has more than 100,000 rows, so we cannot connect to it via the online service.

How can I get the same sort of functionality from the desktop client? Is it possible?

[Budfudder]

A bit of further information - the inability of the CRM content pack to import more than 100,000 rows is documented. From https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-content-pack-microsoft-dynamics-crm/:

From System Requirements:

- An account with less than 100k records in any of the tables. Note if the account has access to more than 100k records the import will fail.

Do I have to tell you that this is an absolutely ridiculous restriction? It means that Power BI Online is simply unusable by my company as we have more than 100,000 records on several tables.

[v-ljerr-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Budfudder,

How can I get the same sort of functionality from the desktop client? Is it possible?

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You can connect to CRM with Power BI Desktop, however, you may need to rebuild the whole reports yourselves. Or you can make use of CRM solution template. There seems no easy way to do it currently.

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Do I have to tell you that this is an absolutely ridiculous restriction? It means that Power BI Online is simply unusable by my company as we have more than 100,000 records on several tables.

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In addition, I would suggest you to submit your requirements on Power BI Ideas and vote it up to improve the functionality of CRM content pack.

Regards

[KHorseman]

For anything more complicated than the very basic stuff the content pack is intended for, you should use a different method to connect to your CRM, such as the odata feed.

[Budfudder]

Thanks - I know that. It doesn't address the question I actually asked.

[MattAllington]

What do you mean "100,000 rows, so we can't connect it via the online service"?  I have a 60 million row table loaded. 

Do you mean "quick insights"?  This is inoy available via the service, not in desktop. 

[Budfudder]

In Power BI Online:

- I click Get Data

- I choose the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Sales Manager content pack

- I input our URL

- I input my logon credentials

- I get the 'Importing Data...this could take a little while' message

- Eventually, I get a popup message stating "We couldn't import data from Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Sales Manager". If I go for more Technical details, I get "Data refresh failed as query exceeded the maximum limit of 100000 records. Dynamics CRM Online data refresh is limited to maximum of 100000 records per query."

Hence what I believed was the inability to open a CRM data source with more than 100000 records in a table.

[MattAllington]

I have never heard of that. Have you tried to do it via Power BI desktop and then publish to the service?

[Budfudder]

That's what this thread is about - a way to do it via the desktop and publish it to the service. And not just a table or two - the whole thing, so that I can run Insights on it.

If you've never heard of it, why am I getting it?