M

Performance Tip: Partition your tables at crossjoins where possible – PowerQuery PowerBI

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Recently I’ve distributed some techniques for partial matches or relative joins between tables using PowerQuery or the query editor in PowerBI. They are very flexible and powerful – yet slow.

To improve performance you can check if there is a chance to “partition” your table using a Table.Group. If you have an equality expression in your statement like we had in our rolling-12-months-exercise here for example:

You can boost performance into a different dimension by grouping your table on the “Associate”-table instead like this:

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Performance difference between Excel and PowerBI with M is huge!

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I knew that the performance of M in the query editor of PowerBI was much better than in Excel, but only today I discovered the incredible difference we actually have here:

If you want to apply the BOM-solution I’ve posted here, you’ll soon discover that the performance in Excel starts to suck with large datasets. Performance decreases exponentially and my sample datasets with 4 levels and 100k rows didn’t went through, 16 GB RAM constantly at the limit, unable to do any other task at the same time.

In contrast, performance in PowerBI totally blew me away: Memory management is different. Rise in RAM-consumption was always below 3 GB, even with my largest dataset (a 5-level 1Mio (!) rows BOM table that exploded to 3,8 Mio rows). Also no sweat in CPU, so I was able to easily perform other tasks at the same time on my laptop.

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How to edit M-function documentation metadata

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After the great announcement yesterday that we will be able to ship custom functions within the shared environment, I’m expecting a lot of people starting to write awesome custom functions for M. Hopefully they will all have nice function descriptions/metadata shipped with them, that makes it as easy as possible for users to apply them correctly:

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KPIs in Easy Profit and Loss for PowerBI

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Welcome to the last part of my Easy Profit & Loss series where I will cover KPIs in rows & columns:

1) KPIs in columns

Show all your figures as a percent of turnover for example: Nice & easy: Divide current figure by the total sum of turnover:

Turnover% =
ABS (
    DIVIDE (
[ActSign],
        CALCULATE (
[ActSign],
            FILTER (
                ALL ( IndividualAccountsLayout ),
IndividualAccountsLayout[Description in Report] = “Income”
            )
        )
    )
)
DAX Formatter by SQLBI

We need to leave the current row context to retrieve the turnover-value in each row, therefore the ALL.

2) KPIs in rows

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