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Comparative Data Type Efficiency in Power BI

Soheil Bakhshi doesn’t want everything in Power BI to be decimals and strings:

In my consulting experience working with customers using Power BI, many challenges that Power BI developers face are due to negligence to data types. Here are some common challenges that are the direct or indirect results of inappropriate data types and data type conversion:

  • Getting incorrect results while all calculations in your data model are correct.
  • Poor performing data model.
  • Bloated model size.
  • Difficulties in configuring user-defined aggregations (agg awareness).
  • Difficulties in setting up incremental data refresh.
  • Getting blank visuals after the first data refresh in Power BI service.

Read on for a dive into these problems.