I started a series of blog posts back in 2020 about best-practice guidelines for planning and designing enterprise reporting solutions with Power BI. To make the topics covered in this series of posts easier to find and follow, they are listed on this page: Doing Power BI The Right Way – for Enterprise Reporting | Paul Turley’s SQL Server BI Blog which you can access from the main menu on the blog. We have a few more topics to go so check back and subscribe for notifications.
Related Posts
DevOps & CI/CD for Power BI
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.

Developing Large Power BI Datasets – Part 3 – Detail Tables
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.
Developing Large Power BI Datasets – Part 2 – Partitioning
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.
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