As expected, Microsoft has been releasing a bunch of news regarding its services at this year"s Ignite conference. Yesterday, the tech giant unveiled a plethora of changes coming to its Power Platform, including security enhancements for Power BI.
Now, some more news has been revealed for Power BI Premium users. As part of a new capability available in public preview, the limit for dataset cache sizes have been massively increased.
Previously, dataset caches could only go up to 10GB after compression. However, they will now only be limited by capacity size in the Premium version of Power BI. This means that storage options of up to 400GB are now being provided for larger models. Obviously, memory required for query execution and processing is also included in the aforementioned capacity, though it usually only accounts for around 20-30% of the total capacity, which still leaves users which a pretty big upgrade.
This change brings model sizes in Power BI to parity with model sizes in Azure Analysis Services. Microsoft has pointed out, though, that the former data analytics service is ahead of the latter due to the availability of features like incremental refresh, aggregations, and shared and certified datasets. The Redmond firm also believes that this move furthers its objective to help Power BI become "the most open BI product in the market."
There are still some restrictions to the utilization of this capability which include a lack of BYOK encryption, failure to work with multi-geo support, and failure to download such datasets to Power BI Desktop. You can learn more about how to create large datasets and discover regional availability for the feature by checking out its documentation here.