Premium performance with multiple users on different reports

[Anonymous]

Hi all, 

My organization is debating whether to switch to Power BI Premium to share our dashboards to our clients.

Let's say we created 25ish reports (each with its own MS SQL database imported; no pbix file would be larger than 10GB) and we shared each one to the corresponding client. How would the performance be if each of these 25 reports are accessed at the same time by 20 users each, so 500 users in total? It would be very unlikely this would happen but I'd like to know just in case. They would only need to view and interact with the report. 

Using the pricing tool, I found that we only needed to get a single server for this number of users and I was wondering whether this workload would be easy on the server?

Also, if I decided to connect to the data using direct query, would the refreshes of the data take a toll on the server since we are dealing with 25 different databases?

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards

[v-kelly-msft]

Hi @Anonymous ,

As suggested by @MariusT ,those factors you should consider before choosing a premium capacity, what's more, premium capacity is a better choice for collaboration,as you said, you hope the ones you shared with have the authority to view and interact with visuals which requires them have the Pro license or your contents are in Premium capacity,so the best choice for your company is to switch to Power BI Premium.

Best Regards,
Kelly

[Anonymous]

Thank you all for the helpful answers. 

If we decide to go for Premium I know that it will currently be hosted in Ireland. In case of a Brexit however, it will drop out of the EU which is unfortunately not an option for us. 

So, I was wondering whether it was also possible to do the hosting ourselves? And what costs would be associated with this? Is Power BI Report Server this particular option?

Kind regards,

[nickyvv]

@Anonymous to react on Brexit: Ireland is not part of Brexit, but Northern Ireland is, so that won't be a problem.

There is also the West Europe region which is located in The Netherlands, is that an option for you?

Hosting Premium

I am not aware of the option of hosting Premium yourself. Power BI Report Server is the SSRS-version accompanied with Power BI Premium, so that's not the same as Premium itself. In addition to a regular SSRS-server it can host Power BI reports (.PBIX), Excel files, and paginated reports (.RDL). Have a look at What is Power BI Report Server? if you want to have more information.

25 datasets in Premium

To add to the other answers above: if you have to load the 25 datasets into memory all at once, they can't exceed the capacity limit of the Power BI Premium SKU you choose. So for example if you choose a P1 (which has 25GB), the average memory of you model can only be 1GB in memory. Which is 3-4 times as big as the pbix file itself as @GilbertQ mentioned.

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[Anonymous]

My mistake on the Ireland part, I mistook it with Northern Ireland. So, hosting in Ireland would not be problem. We are located in The Netherlands so that would be the best option. However, I tested publishing some reports and it stated that my data was stored in North Europe (Ireland). 

Reading the comments, it seems like I would need to have a server with bigger memory. Like a P3 node or multiple P1 nodes? My current PBIX files would be 2GB in size, so 8GB in memory. This means only 3-4 reports can be loaded into memory at the same time, which is not desirable. 

Kind regards

[GilbertQ]

Hi there

What you could do is when running Power BI Premium you could use the Geolocation feature and host the Power BI Premium in the Netherlands.

The reason you have it stating it is in Ireland is because your default tenant is there, which was created before there was an option in Netherlands.

[MariusT]

Hi JoostV,

There is a lot to take into concideration when deciding on a Premium capacity, and then which SKU to choose. I will not be able to cover everything, but I will try to give you some aspects to concider:

1) Storage mode - Import vs. DQ will each have own demands in terms of capacity

Reports in import mode may require extensive memory and CPU during refreshes. You say that there will be no reports larger than 10GB, but long before you reach that size you may already have created one or several reports with long refresh duration. Further, in your example, you use the total of 25 reports. Then you also must consider the refresh schedule, both in terms of parallell refreshes, but also how many refreshes during the 24H.

2) Report interaction

In import mode, when users interact with reports, the model must be uploaded to the memory. If a report is not used in the last 3 minutes it will be regarded as inactive. This allows Power BI to evict the model from the memory when somebody asks to interact with another report that is not already stored in memory. The problem may arise when the memory capacity is reached, and there is no inactive reports to evict. In terms of user experience, at least from my own experience, import models will on average provide a higher level of user experience in terms of waiting time, since all the data is imported and uploaded to the memory.

When it comes to DQ mode, each time someone interacts with the content in the report, Power BI sends a query down to the source. For your Premium capacity, this is demanding in terms of CPU usage, and is positively correlated with the amount of pages and further the amount of visualizations on each page. Also, it becomes even more demanding if RLS is involved.

I am no DBA, so I don't want to say anything about stress on the server.

If you have not already read it, I would suggest you take a look at this article: https://docs.microsoft.com/nb-no/power-bi/service-premium-what-is

Also, in this article you will find a link to another article about the Premium Capacity Metrics App, which might be handy to analyze your environment if you decide to go for Power BI Premium.

[GilbertQ]

Another thing to note, is when using Power BI premium it is based on the memory of the expanded PBIX file. This is typically 3-4 X larger than the PBIX file once expanded. You must also take that into consideration.