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Load Testing in Power BI

Chris Webb gives us the why and the how:

If you’re about to put a big Power BI project into production, have you planned to do any load testing? If not, stop whatever you’re doing and read this!

In my job on the Power BI CAT team at Microsoft it’s common for us to be called in to deal with poorly performing reports. Often, these performance problems only become apparent after the reports have gone live: performance was fine when it was just one developer testing it, but as soon as multiple end-users start running reports they complain about slowness and timeouts. At this point it’s much harder to change or fix anything because time is short, everyone’s panicking and blaming each other, and the users are trying to do their jobs with a solution that isn’t fit for purpose. Of course if the developers had done some load testing then these problems would have been picked up much earlier.

With that in mind, Chris explains some of the things we can do to help with load testing in Power BI.