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Anonymous
Not applicable

How does number of reports in the Service effect performance?

Hello Community  -  At our company we are having a debate about quantity versus quality when it comes to Power Bi reports.  

 

On the one hand, it is quite easy to use a dataset (that essentially just has ERP and Salesforce fields) and drag and drop fields to create quick reports in the Power Bi Service.    This is what I call the regurgation of reporting from our existing systems.   Our ERP is clunky, so we create dataflows out of the various ERP tables, and serve this up to our internal customers.   No specialized DAX measures, nothing fancy, just literally recreating reports that could otherwise be found in ERP or SF.  

 

The problem with this approach is that although they are very easy to build, literally just dragging and dropping fields into big tables with no additional visualizations to speak of, this can (and has) resulted in a myriad of reports that no one asked for, and no one needs.   (we can thank are database admin for that)

 

On the other hand, is the idea of creating targeted, specialized reports that serve a particular need, as requested.  And indeed in some cases this might just be a big giant table, but often there's much more to it.    The result is fewer, but more focused reports.  

 

And ultimately my question is not so much about which approach is correct, but a long way of asking what impact does having a lot of reports have on the overall performance?  

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
lbendlin
Super User
Super User

By themselves they have no impact whatsoever. Think of reports as meta data zombies. The do nothing when they are not being looked at.

 

What you are really looking for is the impact of the number of datasets that are requested to be loaded into the memory of your capacity SKUs (and the size of these SKUs).

 

Granted, if a report is being used it will then (depending on the measure definitions and Direct Query activities) generate some heat. But that is mostly dwarfed by the impact a dataset refresh has on the capacity.

 

It's a similar story with workspaces. They carry no performance cost.

 

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1 REPLY 1
lbendlin
Super User
Super User

By themselves they have no impact whatsoever. Think of reports as meta data zombies. The do nothing when they are not being looked at.

 

What you are really looking for is the impact of the number of datasets that are requested to be loaded into the memory of your capacity SKUs (and the size of these SKUs).

 

Granted, if a report is being used it will then (depending on the measure definitions and Direct Query activities) generate some heat. But that is mostly dwarfed by the impact a dataset refresh has on the capacity.

 

It's a similar story with workspaces. They carry no performance cost.

 

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