DirectQuery
Many of you have likely been trying to envision how you may implement these data imports in your environment. You may have asked yourself questions such as the following:
- If data imported into Power BI uses an in-memory technology, has my company provided me with a machine that has enough memory to handle this?
- Am I really going to import my source table with tens of billions of rows into memory?
- How do I handle the requirement of displaying results in real time from the source?
These are all excellent questions that would have many negative answers if the only way to connect to your data was by importing your source into Power BI. Fortunately, there is another way. Using DirectQuery, Power BI allows you to connect directly to a data source so that no data is imported or copied into Power BI Desktop.
Why is this a good thing? Consider the questions that were asked at the beginning of this section. Since no data is imported to Power BI...
