Why would Premium be better than Pro for refresh times?

[thisisausername]

Assuming that we don't need any of the specific extra features offered by Premium, and are just interested in 'better performance'.

What exactly does Premium give us that would better than what Microsoft already manages with all its resources as part of Pro - in terms of refresh times?

Things like Premium having a maximum number of concurrent refreshes etc. make me wonder this.

[v-lionel-msft]

Hi @thisisausername ,

The biggest advantage of Premium is that it provides exclusive capacity for the organization. From this point, you can consider other performance problems.

What is Power BI Premium? 

Best regards,
Lionel Chen

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@thisisausername This isn't as easy as "premium is better" in terms of performance. You get a ton when it comes to just Pro licenses. Premium is great because you get dedicated capacity, but you are now bound by the specific capacity. If you are looking at P1 skus then that is a 8 core machine with 25GB of RAM... depending on how much you have going on, that could be a ton (which means the isolation would be good in terms of you being able to see an increase in refresh times. Or, it could be really small so you are incurring a really large cost for a "smaller" machine.

There are many more factors to consider depending on your use-case.

[thisisausername]

So Premium could  offer worse performance (e.g. in terms of total refresh times) if you choose a SKU that's too small for your organization?

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@thisisausername Absolutely. For example, we use embedded extensively. If I buy an A1 sku that only gives me 1 core and 3GB of RAM. Most of my datatsets when being processed are well over 2GB and some over that. Throw in multiple reports refreshing and different models and I regularly have to start at an A3 for my different embedded capacity neeeds. The same principals apply to P sku's. You have to look at the total processing RAM not just storage of the compressed models. And, all the models you have and refresh times. So if your needs are more in the 30-40 GB range then you automatically need a P2 sku to support your needs. In fact, with the premium storage if you don't have enough space, datasets just don't refresh at all because you are out of space.

Like I said, if people realized how much they get with a Pro license, they start to understand why its a great deal and why both report authors and end users need one.... all the infrastructure to support the "easy" experience adds up quick.