2 ways to reduce your Power BI dataset size and speed up refresh 

Loads of love for this optimization technique. It felt like the PBIX file was suffocated with unrelated columns.

Never really thought columns had an effect, thank you so much for this!

I have recently started expanding my knowledge with PBI and your channel has amazing information, examples and tips. I appreciate your work very much! Thank you for your efforts!

By unchecking the auto-date/time , it simply brought down my data model size by 22MB! I am so happy I tried this. You do a fab job, keep it coming!

Brilliant! As someone used to working with tabular data, I inherently knew removing unwanted columns takes a huge load of schemas. I am a newbie to Power BI and was looking on ways to reduce the model size on my projects and your video just proves how simple it is to cut down the size if you are really *clear* about your data. Thanks for highlighting that part so well, Adam!

I am a recent subscriber to your channel and must say I love it! Thank you for putting in effort and time and sharing your knowledge.

Nice Video. Like that its not just repetitive basics. Its very IRL scenario based of optimization.

Because this video, I was able to reduce the size of a Power BI report that includes a customized calendar dimension from 500 MB to 2 MB, by just turning off the Time Intelligence feature. This is so unreal that I got my coworker to reproduce the size reduction. In hind site, it makes so much sense based on how Time Intelligence works. Thank you so much!

Aaaahhhhh where would I be without Guy in a Cube? As always, fantastic info.

Adam, this is an incredible video, thank you. It makes so much sense now that you have explained.

You guys are the bomb! Thanks for the tips. That VertiPaq Analyzer thing? Holy crap! That's a gold mine! It shows all my measures! I've been looking for something like this for forever!

Nice Video. Like that its not just basic repetitive basic skills, But real life scenario for optimization.

Thanks so much; As always, it has been super helpful! We greatly appreciate you guys giving back to the community this way. Keep up the good work!!

Just used this as a step by step to analyze a model that I am working on. I knew I had to get rid of columns (and I had) but now I am pruning even more ruthlessly. And one thing I would add--don't be afraid to remove columns--you can always add what you need back. So what I do is select JUST the columns I know I want, and then use REMOVE OTHER COLUMNS. Then, if I find that there is a column I DO need, I go back to that REMOVE OTHER COLUMNS step, and modify the command by adding the name of the column I need back in. Super easy, super quick.

Very helpful Adam - thanks for doing the video

Very helpful, Adam. Thanks a lot. LOL on 'just like on a cooking show' liked that too!

Great video. Thanks a lot. I just learned some new tips.

Thanks for this information also i think even if the organization said may we need this column latter on , it is easy to get this column again not a big deal

Really amazing. I have reduce one of my pbix file from 256 Mo to 182 Mo. I also discover a lot of options to optimize my data set. Thank you

I completely agree with removing columns that you don't need. But, I think we need to be careful that we don't remove so many columns that we can no longer guarantee uniqueness in the table. When a context transition occurs, the table is iterated and if we have duplicate rows, they will get double (or triple etc.) processed causing very hard to catch (and resolve) bugs.

My file size was relatively small (c.4 MB) but visual fails to load in PowerBI service. This has helped me to optimise how the table loads and it is now working! This did not reduce my file size significantly (now c.3.5 MB) but that's not the point anyway. Thanks Adam

Great video, I just saw the another from Aug 2020 :) about disable Auto Date/Time

Great tips.. I always use Remove other Columns to make sure I only keep the columns I need.. always get rid of the columns as a first step and not after you have done bunch of transformations.. plus always, always reduce the date-time to date only if you dont need the time. Time adds lot of bulk to the size (i guess because of high cardinality). hopefully PowerBI team will add Vertipaq analyzer-like tool in performance analyzer

If only I saw this video on time, like for example last year....awesome video guys

My file size has reduced a lot. Thank you so much

Appreciate this kind of video.

Thanks Patrick! Amazing impact that losing a few redundant columns has! 🐱‍👤🐱‍👤

Seeing that file size go down from 600MB to 74MB just made a my jaw drop! Thanks for this!

Amazing! Turning off the date/time configuration you mention in the video reduced my report size by 8MB!

Great optimization tips, thank you

Excellent video! Just reduced my PBIX file from 136MB to 34MB. Goes to show how little I know about how data is stored. I had several tables with a couple of unique key columns.

Thanks for the info in this video, impressed with how much this decreases the size of the Powerbi File! Would a similar approach work if you are suffering with the "visual has exceeded the available resources" error in the service when linking to a powerbi dataset?

Awesome, thank you!

Great video as always, you guys are great!

Excellent video! I will use countrows from now on and ditch unique ids

Someone else already mentioned the datetime fields to watch out for and another one is calculated columns. Great job as always 👍

Amazing... only removing the Auto date/time reduced a pbix file from 20mb to 2mb. loved it!!!

Thank you so much for your tutorial. I am using ssas multidimensional live connection. I am trying to create a stacked column chart which show month x axis and value y axis. also shows month wise top selling store. But when i try to top n filter by store that filter shows highest sales per year not filter month wise sales. Please help me how can i solve this.

Ya, I have a model which is taking every time over an hour to refresh. I'm using dataflow as the source and still is taking a long time. So, my next step will be to check if I need all the columns :) Thanks for the video.

Good techniques What i normally do is take out as many colums as possible with select colums, and you can always bring them back if at some stage you need a previously removed colum. Just disable data type detection and select data types as your last step

Thanks for the video. This message appear when i edit the connection and perform the refresh data of this connection. "We couldn't refresh the connection. Please go to existing connections and verify they connect to the file or server". what should i d?

You present very well!!

Great video!

Thanks for what you guys do. Seriously it's so practical and easy to absorb, your channel is very undersubscribed

Million thanks

This is great!

Hi Adam & Patrick, thank you guys so much for posting awesome contents, as always :) One thing I would like to point out is the shout out for DAX Studio. I have to admit I was a little bit surprised that Darren Gosbell wasn't mentioned as he's the creator and main contributor of DAX Studio. Yes, no doubt that Marco and Alberto (I have huge respect for them) have contributed in some of the coding; Marco has also mentioned a few times that people have mistaken him as its creator and had to clarify that he contributed approx. 5 - 10% of it. So I'm not sure whether that's the case here. Once again, thanks for the awesome contents and keep being awesome!

Guys you are amazing, keep it up

Hello Patrick - Thanks. This is a great tutorial on the usage of DAX Studio and VertiPaq analyzer. I have tried using it for my Power BI report which is built based on SAP BW Application server connector. However, I do not see SSAS connection to update the local host and analyze. Could you please help me understand how I can create it? Thanks, PS

Hi Adam i am a very big fan of your power bi videos.......... i have a small doubt about how to validate the reports that are developed in Power BI Desktop .....Thanks in advance

I initially add just the fields I can filter on (market, customer type etc), together with one fact (e.g. order quantity), then I filter, then I add all the other columns required. The only annoying thing is that once you change a column data type, then you can't add any more from the data tables (at least on import).

One thing I always do is ensure I get rid of datetime fields especially if time is very precise. Set as date or if you need the time extra it into another column. a Datetime has high cardinality but a date and time in sperate fields are low. If I don't need to be so precise I could just have the minute of the day or the hour. I also add any custom columns in M/Powerquery rather than Dax as you can get better compression or if I can use a measure.

First.. Great Video.. Second.. I love how you say to "Jump over to Premium to give you some breathing room" Power BI Premium sits at a price point that only large corporations can afford it. I would love to jump to it for the use of computed tables inside data flows, but cant get it into the budget till next year.

Thanks! I use regularly Vertipaq, but I forgot how important is to delete unused columns ( I reduced close to 100Mb from 170MB). Adam, do you a way to reduce the evaluation process of the table? That is always taking so much time. I optimize my SQL folding so is fast but some table takes ages to evaluate in the refresh.

Great ideas presented to reduce the dataset.

very good video. This needs an update though as I cannot follow all the options are not the same any more

Oh man... I really would love to show you what were working on. I'm in healthcare data analysis. Healthcare data is legit big and we're doing everything we can think of to reduce our data size. Our latest project PBI file saves at 6GB!

Hi Adam, great talk, however what are your toughts about the usal practice of creating huge / heavy / slow multipurpose "golden" datasets which intend to solve the "several sources of truth" problem by putting everything and the kitchen sink in a single dataset file serving dozens of reports?

Hi Adam, very nice video! Thanks a lot, and just wondering what is video recording application that you use to recording your operation on PowerBI? Very appreciate it if you can reply me !

Thanks Adam. I unchecked Auto date/time and my PBI file dropped from 80MB to 2.4MB !!!!!

Good examples. I’ve got a team with an S1 AAS, with ginormous composite transaction key that needs to die. Would save money to get it down to an S0.

Must needed techniques!

Extremely helpful:)

Hello. Is it any differences between removing columns or loading not all columns from the file from performance perspective?

3:15 Yup I approve that! 😅 I worked with a table of around 12 mil records and not only it took about 2+ hours to fetch on the desktop, ate up all the ram making the PC almost unusable!!!

OMG! Is that a Lone Star State on the Millennium Falcon? LEGIT!

VERY Nice video. Love you guys ! s2

This is really great! Thanks Adam! Would there be any negative impact(s) if we disable the time intelligence for an existing report have datetime columns.

after choosing the columns to keep, will the data refresh the same or will it throw error?

Hi I need to analyze multiple csv files of each 1mb size. Then how many files can I connect

You guys should cover the inforiver visual 🙏

Wow awesome tips

Excel is fun has an outstanding video on the same topic

Thank you man! Only the time intelligence reduced my file size from 52MB to 22MB :D

This is some goood stuff.!!!

Hey Adam, when it comes to the Performance Analyzer, what number would be too high for a DAX query, Visual display, or Other? I have DAX queries that range from 100 to 300. I know some optimization could be used but it would be nice to tell my team what to look for as a guide.

i dont see the ssas connection option when using vertipaq analyzer, im using a connection to an sql db with azure active directory for power bi

Hello, may I know why there is SSAS? Is it the data source of pbix?

Does in make any sense to group and summarise the remaining columns after deleting unnecessary IDs? Would it increase performance given that Power BI has very intelligent "packing" abilities?

Great stuff. Got rid of 500MB worth of LocalDate_tables o/. Also found that in one report we have 22 million rows where one column contains numbers but is stored as a String. Wrong on so many levels :) It's not even used in the report! 700MB saved in a few seconds. This will come handy setting up guidelines for building Power BI-reports in our organization. Thanks!

Perfect

Love this. I was wondering, If you have a Surrogate Key and a Business ID which would be high cardinality and you join the tables by Key. Could you actually remove the business keys from the model or should you always leave those in. for example Product Key 1 Product ID 35335 ? I'm thinking in terms of the Fact table AND dimension if you have gone for a STAR schema

15:30 you have selected few columns and apply and load. While we publish this from Dev to Prod, do you think it will create problem? If the columns will missmatch in dev and test and prod.

Hello, here from Chile and I am a fan of your RU-vid channel. I would like to get the files that you show in the video to be able to practice and follow your steps. I will be grateful if you could share them. Regards!!!

One little thing though - if you disable Auto Date many of your Quick measures won't work any longer as only power bi provided date hierarchies are supported.

Do you normally create a backup of the PBI data before you remove columns? Is that just as easy as just creating a PBI file? Just in case we removed columns we should not have done. If so, how do you backup the proper way before we start removing columns, to retain an original the client provided.

Adam, you're awesome!

M using Huge data set around 2b rows,, and that too using python query to pull data from Mongo .... does this Incremental refresh helps in this scenario ???? pl do Help help Help

SSAS doesnt show up in the "existing connections" inside power pivot?

What is Evaluating set do when refreshing the report. I am using the SharePoint folder with JSON as my data source. It is very slow when refreshing. Major time taking in Evaluations.

A quick question about data flows and pbi service, would it make sense to load large dimensions to data flows and then only reference it (dataflow) in reports or that approach could cause issues in the long run?

Hi Adam love your videos. What do you guys use to zoom in and out on the screen? I also saw it at the MS biz app summit. Thanks!

Yoooo .... Sometimes a refresh process that typically lasts 10-15min gets some problem and doesn´t finish succesfully. In the meanwhile it that schedule refresh keeps the status as in progress for 2 hours and I cannot start an manual refresh while that scheduled refresh hasn´t finished. How can I proceed to manually stop a refresh that is currently running?

this actually works

Can you do this in power query ?

Just stumbled across this video - some good tips. Couple of questions though: 1. Unchecking the auto-date/time setting stops me from being able to show a nice hierarchical date slicer (Year->Qtr->Month->Day) - How could I still have one or more of those with the setting disabled? 2. For reducing the number of columns in the dataset, wouldn't it be better to edit the initial source query to only get the columns you need from source? Otherwise, you are telling Power BI to pull in all the columns (and have to handle them all), just to then say "now forget about half the columns I just told you to import"

hi! Thank you very much for sharing such interesting videos! Could you share the excel file you use in the video and could you explain a little more about the use of DAX Studio? Thanks!

I was looking for other options then deleting columns

Hoe do i access Dax studio and vertiPaq analyzer tools?

Like a cookie show 🙂🙂 Thanks Adam for this great video and tips