1. Power BI Internals Eugene Meidinger @sqlgene www.sqlgene.com/powerbi/

2. About me Business Intelligence Developer
Certified in Querying and Administering SQL Server
Spoken at Pittsburgh SQL User Group and various SQL Saturdays
Pluralsight author
Worked for All-Lines / Lantek for 5 years
Went from SQL newb to SQL pro

3. All Lines is a local woman owned solutions provider that delivers cost effective, industry standard IT solutions to our customers.
We strive to be a Professional Business Partner and Trusted Advisor with each of our clients. We help companies streamline and improve the way they buy, implement, and manage their technology infrastructures that support their mission critical business applications.

4. Enterprise Infrastructure
Our Services
All Lines is the only IT Services company in the region able to deliver the full range of services we can. From hardware to hosting we can keep your business efficient and in top production.
Managed Services
IT Consulting
Microsoft Solutions
IT Staffing
Enterprise Infrastructure
Our programs will reduce IT costs, improve
performance of the network, and assure a consistent level of service.
We provide assessment, design, implementation, management,
monitoring, and computer support services for all business computing needs.
SharePoint and Office 365 give you and the people you work with a better way to get
things done together.
We provide IT staffing
services for a variety of industries in the local market including manufacturing,
finance, healthcare, among others.
We provide proofs of concepts and assessments in all of these areas.  We can also provide demos on site at our data center in Warrendale.

5. What are we going to cover?
PBIX file format
Vertipaq engine
Power BI visualizations
Power BI Service

6. Why internals? Sell the Steak, not the Sizzle It’s different!
Better confidence
Better guesses
Better performance

7. PBIX Format It’s just a zip file Terrible for source control Contains:
OneDrive is the recommended way for versioning
Contains:
Data model
PowerQuery queries
Data visualizations
Metadata
???

8. Demo – Opening a pbix file

9. Power BI == SSAS Tabular
Same concepts apply to both
Running SSAS Tabular locally
Runs on a random port
You can connect to it with SSMS / Excel / Trace

10. Demo – Connect to to Power BI

11. Vertipaq Runs in memory Columnar database
Columns of data are stored together
Data is encoded and compressed
Quick results
Optimized for single column operations

12. Compression and encoding
Value Encoding
Dictionary Encoding
Run-length encoding
Sorting

13. Value Encoding Only applies to integers
Specifically, integers in a narrow range
Subtracts a base number from all the integers to take up less space
201,202,203 becomes (1,2,3)+200

14. Dictionary Encoding Converts values to integers keys in a dictionary
“Washington” might become 1

15. Run-length encoding Compresses continuous series of values
Depends on sort order
The engine automatically determines the best sort
Great for correlated data
More columns = worse compression

16. Calculated columns and compression
Calculated columns are computed at time of refresh/creation
Calculated columns are part of the table
Calculated columns take up RAM
Calculated columns are compressed last

17. Demo compression

18. Visualization engine
HTML
CSS
Javascript
D3.js

19. Demo – Opening a visualization

20. Power BI Service is built on Azure
Azure Traffic manager
Azure Active Directory
Blob Storage (For your data)
Azure SQL Database (For metadata)
Service Bus

21. Your data is tied to a specific datacenter

22. Security Whitepaper

23. Questions?