Power BI Practice: Report-Level Filters Are Ineffective for Sampling Data in Power BI

Scenario:

You are modeling data by using Microsoft Power Bl. Part of the data model is a large Microsoft SQL Server table named Order that has more than 100 million records. During the development process, you need to import a sample of the data from the Order table.

Solution: You add a report-level filter that filters based on the order date. Does this meet the goal?

No, adding a report-level filter based on the order date does not meet the goal of importing a sample of the data from the Order table during the development process.

A report-level filter only affects the data displayed in the report, not the data imported into the data model. To import a sample of the data, you should use a query-level filter in Power Query. This way, you can limit the number of records imported from the SQL Server table, which is more efficient for development purposes.

Refer:

https://hashnotes.hashnode.dev/power-bi-practice-efficiently-importing-sample-data-from-a-large-sql-server-table-into-power-bi

Additional Note:

What is “Sampling data”?

Sampling data in Power BI refers to the process of selecting a subset of data from a larger dataset. This is particularly useful when working with very large datasets, as it allows you to work with a manageable amount of data during the development and testing phases. Here are a few key points about data sampling in Power BI:

[1] Efficiency: Sampling helps improve performance by reducing the amount of data that needs to be processed and visualized.

[2] Testing: It allows you to test your data models, transformations, and visualizations on a smaller dataset before applying them to the full dataset.

[3] Random Sampling: Power BI provides functions like SAMPLE in DAX, which can return a sample of rows from a table

[4] High-Density Sampling: For visualizations like scatter charts, Power BI uses algorithms to sample high-density data points to ensure that the visual remains responsive and representative