Paul Turley's SQL Server BI Blog
sharing my experiences with the Microsoft data platform, SQL Server BI, Data Modeling, SSAS Design, Power Pivot, Power BI, SSRS Advanced Design, Power BI, Dashboards & Visualization since 2009
At great effort and considerable coordination, storm trackers gathered in key positions in fields throughout three midwestern states to pay tribute and honor Bill Paxton, star of the movie Twister. Pretty amazing.
DevOps isn’t difficult to implement for small and medium-scale projects, and simple things like managing version control in a code repository can save hours of lost time. Organization who are accustomed to managing large application development initiatives might expect to have a fully automated build and deployment process in concert with an Agile delivery process, managed with specialized tools like Jira, GitHub and Azure DevOps.
Power BI is architected to consume data in a dimensional model, with narrow fact tables and related dimensions. Introducing a big, wide table in a tabular model is extremely inefficient. It takes up space and memory resources, impacts performance, and complicates measure coding. Flattening records into a flat table is one of the worst things you can do in Power BI and a common mistake made by novice Power BI users.
Table partitioning has long been an important task in semantic model design using SQL Server Analysis Services. Since SSAS Tabular and Power BI models are built on top of the SSAS architecture, the pattern of partitioning remains the same as it has been for twenty years. However, the specific methods for implementation have been fine-tuned and improved. The reasons for partitioning large fact tables mainly include:
Improve refresh speed,
Prevent reloading historical records,
Capture updated history,
Reduce database resource load
You don’t have to have massive tables to benefit from partitioning. Even tables with a few hundred thousand records can benefit from partitioning, to improve data refresh performance and to detect source data changes. There is little maintenance overhead, so the benefits usually outweigh the cost, in terms of effort and management.