The Power BI service can handle a lot of data, but just because your data sources are big doesn’t mean that your Power BI datasets will also take up a lot of space. If the data model is designed efficiently, even terabytes of source data will usually translate into megabytes, or a few gigabytes of dataset storage at most. As the industry has largely made the transition from on-prem SQL Server Analysis Services and AAS tabular models to Power BI datasets in Premium capacity, the size limits in the cloud service are notable. The following reference chart from the Microsoft Learning docs shows that a P1 Premium dedicated capacity is limited to 25 GB per dataset. That’s a lot but there are Premium capacity SKUs that can handle up to 400 GB of compressed data in an in-memory data model.
Click through for Paul’s introductory thoughts and stay tuned for part 2.