Chris Bailiss dives into some join problems in Power BI against Snowflake and SQL Server:
Power BI generates SQL that performs very poorly against Snowflake (and possibly other database platforms) when joining nullable columns, e.g. in the “Merge Queries” action in the Power BI query editor.
Specifically, the SQL generated prevents the use of the “hash join” physical join algorithm that has been one of the main algorithms used for decades by database engines when executing joins between large tables. This forces database engines to fall-back to using very inefficient physical joins (e.g. loop/cartesian join) that can perform orders of magnitude slower.
The reason why Power BI generates different SQL for non-nullable for nullable columns in a join is explained in the “Problem Part 2” section below.
Read the whole thing—and there’s a lot of good information in there.