Salesforce data pull into Power BI is very slow

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

I am new to power BI. I am trying to load the Salesforce data into Power BI through the prebuild API connector available. The time it takes to pull one salesforce object into Power BI takes ages.Is there a better way to pull the data.

I used to use QlikSense prior to Power BI. In QlikSense we created QVD's (used for faster data loads)  for objects. Is ther an alternative for Power BI to pull the data faster from Salesforce?

[v-juanli-msft]

Hi @Anonymous

Since i can't reproduce such large data as yours and make a test to verify which way is better, i would like to provide a genaral suggestion which you may consider and have a try.

Ways to connect to Salesforce:

You could Connect to Salesforce with Power BI service,

Besides, Power BI Desktop provides 2 options for connecting directly to Salesforce:

1. Salesforce Object (Both Standard & Custom) – In Salesforce, objects are fields that are grouped together based on category or tab. Examples include products, opportunities, leads and each of these objects contains a number of related fields that can be brought into a data model for reporting within Power BI Desktop. 
2. Salesforce Reports – Within Salesforce, users can create various reports which can be connected to directly through Power BI Desktop. The benefit of connecting to a pre-built Salesforce report is that it should already contain the fields needed for your analysis which would eliminate the need for some data manipulation and mapping when modeling data.

Based on this idea, there is 2000 row limit from  Salesforce Report API but not from Power BI when connecting to Salesforce API with power bi desktop.
As a workaround for the above issue, you can use Salesforce Object connector in Power BI Desktop to pull all the rows from individual tables and recreate reports you’d like. The Object connector doesn’t have the 2000 row limit.

Best Regards

Maggie