Solution Brief

Optimize Power BI with AtScale

Optimize Power BI with AtScale
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Many enterprises rely on Power BI for business reporting. As these enterprises move their data to cloud platforms like Snowflake, Databricks, and Google BigQuery, Power BI presents performance, scalability, and governance challenges. Slow queries, stale data, and complex refresh cycles limit traditional modes like Import and DirectQuery. With AtScale’s semantic layer, enterprises overcome these challenges, enabling real-time insights, consistent metrics, and optimized performance for Power BI.

Key Challenges in Power BI

  • Performance Bottlenecks: Power BI’s native language is DAX, and its DirectQuery mode has trouble translating DAX into SQL inefficiently.
  • Inability to Handle Large Datasets:
    • Import Mode requires data to be imported and stored locally in Power BI servers’ memory, leading to data size constraints.
    • Power BI’s Direct Lake option also struggles with scalability, defaulting to the slower DirectQuery mode for datasets that exceed modest data size thresholds.
  • Inconsistent Metrics: End users can create semantic models at the Power BI workbook level, leading to conflicting and inconsistent KPIs.
  • High Costs: Inefficient cloud usage for Direct Query mode increases data platform costs, while Direct Lake and Import mode leads to data duplication, additional processing and storage costs.
  • Security and Governance: Ensures compliance with data access policies through row- and column-level governance and integrates with LDAP/Active Directory for secure, role-based access control.

AtScale: The Semantic Layer Advantage

AtScale bridges Power BI with cloud data platforms (e.g., Snowflake, Databricks), providing:

  • Live Query Access: Eliminates data imports and ensures real-time insights.
  • Optimized Performance: Native DAX support avoids query translation delays, delivering 4x faster queries.
  • Consistent Metrics: Standardizes business definitions in centrally managed semantic models, ensuring accuracy across tools and teams.
  • Enhanced Governance: Enforces row and column-level security with enterprise directory integrations.

Power BI Use Cases Powered by AtScale

  • Enterprise-Scale Analytics: Analyze billions of rows without pre-aggregation.
  • Self-Service BI: Empower non-technical users with intuitive, consistent, business-friendly models through self-service BI, eliminating the need to model data at the workbook level.
  • Cost Optimization: Reduce cloud computing and storage costs by over 3x.

See AtScale in Action

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