Power BI Insights: Data import comparisons; Admin scripts; Leveraging Power Platform; Power BI Cleaner; Removing characters

Power BI pros discuss data import comparisons, admin scripts, working with other parts of the Power Platform, Power BI Cleaner and removing characters before and after a delimiter.

Data import comparisons

Chris Webb shared a comparison of data imports into Power BI with ADLS Gen2 and Synapse Analytics Serverless. Many users wonder whether Parquet files work better than CSV files. To test it out, Webb loaded data from CSV files into Parquet files with Azure Data Factory, and ran two additional tests: filtering data to a specific date and doing Group By on the date column. He ran an additional two tests, as well, connecting directly to files in ADLS Gen2 and importing data to Power BI with the Synapse connector. Webb wrote:

If you’re importing all the data from files in ADLSgen2 then connecting direct is faster than going via Synapse Serverless…[but] if you’re connecting direct to files in ADLSgen2 and importing all the data from them then CSV files are faster than Parquet files.

According to Webb's findings, if users need to transform data then connecting to Parquet files with Synapse Serverless is faster than any other method.

Power BI admin scripts to know

Brett Powell, writing on Insight Quest, shared a second round of important Power BI admin scripts, which he added into his GitHub repo.