Large model support in Power BI Premium reaches GA, new features announced

Last week, Microsoft added an automated template app installation configuration capability to its Power BI service. Then, yesterday, Power BI Premium introduced full report attachments for report subscriptions.

Today, Microsoft has announced that large model support in Power BI Premium has reached general availability (GA). The capability was first unveiled in the form of a public preview in November last year.

Allowing dataset caches to contain up to 400GB of large models in a massive 40x increase over the base 10GB limit, the feature brought model sizes in Power BI to parity with model sizes in Azure Analysis Services. Notably, memory required for query execution and processing is also included in the 400GB capacity, though it usually only accounts for 20-30% of the total available memory.

With the GA release, Microsoft has also introduced some enhancements to the feature set boasted by larger model support. These include:

• User interface enhancements. Users can conveniently convert existing datasets to the large storage format and set workspace defaults in the Power BI portal, as the above screenshots illustrate.
• Multi-Geo support for large models. Multi-Geo is a Premium feature that helps multinational customers address regional, industry-specific, or organizational data residency requirements. You can now deploy large models in regions other than the home region of your Power BI tenant.
• Bring your own encryption keys (BYOK) for large models. By default, Power BI uses Microsoft-managed keys to encrypt your datasets at rest, but you can also use your own keys in Power BI Premium. With BYOK for large models, you can control and revoke your organization’s keys to increase security and meet compliance requirements. For example, if you revoke the keys, your datasets are unreadable to the service within 30 minutes.

For more information on how to set up Premium capacities for larger models, the capability's availability by region, and more, interested users can check out its documentation here.