Chapter 8: Loading, Transforming, and Refreshing Data

So far, we have focused a lot on performance monitoring and investigation. We have now reached the next phase of our journey into Power BI performance management. Here, we will begin looking at what actions we can take to remedy the performance issues we discovered while using the tools that were introduced in previous chapters. From here on, each chapter will look deep at a specific area of a Power BI solution and will provide performance guidance. The first of these is loading data into Power BI.

Loading new data periodically is a critical part of any analytical system, and in Power BI, this applies to Import mode datasets. Data refresh and its associated transformations can be some of the most CPU and memory-intensive operations. This can affect user activities and cause refresh failures. Large datasets that occupy a significant portion of a host's memory, and that have complex data transformations, are more prone to...