Vidas Matelis Analysis Services Blog

On Oct 26, 2013 I presented at “Big Data Saturday” event in Toronto, Canada. Here I am posting my session key points and notes.

Power Pivot Database

• Make a copy of your workbook and change extension from .xlsx to .zip. Inside zip file in the folder “xl\customData” there is file item1.data that is backup of Power Pivot database.
• When Power Pivot engine starts it restores database backup on your machine in the folder %temp%. Power Pivot will create sub-folder “Vertipaq_<GUID>” where in .db sub-folder you will find folder for each table in your model. Tip – go into biggest table folder, order files by size and see if you really need columns that use most of the space.

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I was working recently with PowerPivot 1.0 workbook and was using it on my desktop and on my laptop. I noticed that there was  big performance difference when I was refreshing my Pivot Tables between these 2 machines so I did more tests to figure out why this is happening.

Here are specs on my machines: Read the rest of this entry »