Querying against imported data in Power BI

1
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I’m pretty new to Power BI and am still at the point of assessing whether it will meet our needs.

I’ve got as far as realising that when creating a new report I can either Import tables (I’m using SQL Server) and use a Direct Query.

The particular report I’m trying to report is quite resource intensive. To create the report in TSql requires iterating through hundreds of thousands of rows in multiple tables in a cursor and then storing some data in a temp table which is the output of the query. I’m very concerned about using the Direct Query option for this because of potential performance degradation on the server.

Is it possible in Power BI Desktop to Import the 5 tables that are used in my query, and then somehow write my query against these tables? That way (in-theory) the query wouldn’t be sent directly to our server each time someone views the report.

My question is based on my lack of knowledge of Power Bi so I may be asking something that is completely impossible!!

Thanks in advance for your help Regards Dotdev

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powerbipowerbi-desktop

1 Answers

0
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That's exactly what Import option does. It imports the tables only once (unless you refresh or change your query). The viewer would be looking at the data that was extracted upon import and packaged into the PBIX file rather than a direct connection to the database.