Storage Mode Detective: Save Resources and Thousands of Euros

Do you work in environments with hundreds or even thousands of models in Power BI? Can you imagine how many resources you could save if you could easily locate those Import mode models with tables containing millions of rows? That’s what this talk is all about. I’m going to show you how to do it.

Not only will you save resources on your capacities and reduce refresh times, but you could even save thousands of euros to your organization - especially if you're working in a self-service BI environment with databases like Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery.

Using Semantic Link, we’ll build a report that shows you the storage mode (Import, DirectQuery, DirectLake...) of every table - not only at the model level! And that’s not all: we’ll do this across all models in your tenant. We’ll also include the number of rows per table, partitions, last refresh date, and more.

And what’s the point of all this? To identify bottlenecks, optimize performance, reduce costs, and above all, help you focus on where you can create the most value by reducing resource usage.

Identify storage mode (Import, DirectQuery, DirectLake) per table across all tenant models. Detect performance and cost bottlenecks using row counts, partitions, and refresh metadata. Apply practical insights to optimize capacity usage and reduce costs.