Power Query Online is, as the name suggests, the online version of Power Query – it’s what you use when you’re developing Power BI Dataflows for example. Sometimes when you’re building a complex, slow query in the Query Editor you’ll notice a message in the status bar at the bottom of the page telling you how long the query has been running for and how much memory and CPU it’s using:
The duration and CPU values are straightforward, but what does the memory value actually represent? It turns out it’s the “Commit (Bytes)” value documented here for Query Diagnostics, that’s to say the amount of virtual memory being used by the query. That’s different to the “Working Set (Bytes)” value which is the amount of physical memory used by the query, and which is not visible anywhere. For a more detailed discussion of these values in Power Query in Power BI Desktop see this post. The maximum commit or working set for a query evalation in Power Query Online isn’t officially documented anywhere (and may change) but I can say three things:
- The maximum commit is larger than the maximimum working set.
- If Power Query Online uses more than the maximum working set then query evaluation will get slow, so if your query uses a lot of memory (say, over 1GB – I suspect you’ll only see this message if it is using a lot of memory…) then you need to do some tuning to reduce it. Probably the best way to do this is to look at the query plan for your dataflow and try to avoid any operations marked as “Full Scan”, as documented here.
- If your query uses more than the maximum commit then it may get cancelled and you’ll see an error (note that the maximum time a query evaluation can run for in Power Query Online anyway is 10 minutes, which is documented here).
[Thanks to Jorge Gomez Basanta for this information]
Power here power there, everything would run with much less power if SSAS team brings Multi-Dimensional Model online into their PowerBI Suite!
What memory is being used? Local machine? Server?
It’s memory in the Power BI Service