What Is The Maximum Length Of A Text Value In Power BI?

What is the maximum length of a text value in Power BI? It turns out that this is a more complex question than you might think!

The maximum length of a text value that the Power Query engine can load into a single cell in a table in a dataset is 32766 characters – any more than that and the text will be silently truncated. However, if you’re working with text inside the Power Query engine you’ll find that you can work with much longer text values.  To illustrate this, consider the following M query:

let
Source =
#table(
type table[charcount = number],
{
{1},
{10000},
{30000},
{40000}
}
),
#"Added Custom" =
Table.AddColumn(
Source,
"LongText",
each Text.Repeat("1", [charcount]),
type text
),
#"Inserted Text Length" =
Table.AddColumn(
#"Added Custom",
"Length",
each Text.Length([LongText]),
Int64.Type
)
in
#"Inserted Text Length"

It creates a table with four rows and three columns. The first column contains the numbers 1, 10000, 30000 and 40000; the second column contains the character “1” repeated the number of times given in the first column; the third column returns the length of the text in the second column using the Text.Length() M function. Here’s the output in the Power Query Editor, which is pretty much as you’d expect:

I’m not sure if there is a maximum length for text values in M; I experimented with adding an extra row to the table above with a 900,000,000 character text value and Text.Length() was able to return the correct value, albeit after a bit of a wait.

Load the table above into your Power BI dataset though, and add a DAX calculated column with the following expression:

DAX Length = LEN('LengthsDemo'[LongText])

…and you can see in the Data pane of the main Power BI Desktop window that the long text value in the last row has been truncated to 32766 characters:

Once you’ve loaded your data into Power BI the documentation says that the maximum length of a text value is “268,435,456 Unicode characters (256 mega characters) or 536,870,912 bytes”. The bad news is that many DAX functions such as ConcatenateX() put a limit on the length of the text values that they can work with at around 2.1 million characters (thank you Jeffrey Wang for providing this information – it isn’t documented anywhere at the moment). If you exceed this limit you’ll get the following error:

Function ‘PLACEHOLDER’ encountered a Text that exceeds the maximum allowable length.

In summary, then, there are two different practical limits on the maximum length of a text value in Power BI: the 32766 character limit on text being loaded into Power BI, and the 2.1 million character limit in DAX functions. The first of these can be worked around with some clever M – you need to split long text values up into multiple smaller values stored in different columns or rows – but even if you do this, the second limit may stop you recreating the original value after the data has been loaded.

Why is this useful or important? How can you split text values up in M in the most efficient way? I’ll come to that in my next two posts!