A few weeks ago, I was tasked with optimizing a slow-performing Power BI report. Of course, there can be dozens of reasons why your Power BI report performs slow, but in this post, I want to share with you the “low-hanging fruit” and how you can significantly improve Power BI semantic models by applying some very simple optimization techniques.

Setting the stage

For demo purposes, I’ll be using a fact table that contains the data about chats performed by a customer support department of the fictitious company Customer First. This table includes approximately 9 million rows, which is not considered a large table in the context of Power BI and analytical workloads. For the sake of simplicity, let’s pretend that our model consists of only this single table. Finally, a semantic model is configured as an Import mode model. If you want to learn how your data is stored in Power BI, I suggest you start by reading this article first.