Power BI Hybrid tables for poor people!
No Premium — no problem! What do you do if a client asks for performance optimization, and there are no premium features available? You improvise and win!
A few weeks ago, I was working with a client who needed performance tuning of their Power BI solution. The challenge was to enable the analysis of over 200 million records in the fact table, while ensuring that the lowest level of detail is also available in the report.
Great, that sounds like a perfect use case for Power BI aggregations! I was thinking of aggregating the data per key attributes and then using an Import mode for these aggregated tables — easy win! However, the client insisted that they need to keep the possibility to dynamically choose per which attributes, and data will be grouped in the report. Simply said, if I pre-aggregate the data, let’s say, on the product AND store, and they want to include a customer in the scope of the analysis, aggregations would not work in that case, as the grain would be different.
Ok, then let’s use Hybrid tables!
“Look, Nikola, we’ve already heard about the hybrid tables and we think they are super cool…But, there is a “small” issue…We don’t have Premium”
