topic Re: Any way to read native qvd (Qlik binary format) into Power BI? in Data Movement & Streaming

Any way to read native qvd (Qlik binary format) into Power BI?

dxter — Wed, 19 Mar 2025 22:11:20 GMT

Hi,

I have a workflow, where I need to reload massive csvs into some BI tool. Of course, it is much easier to do, if data is compressed into some format or written as RAM dump.

1st approach (compressed) is used in Qlik and Tableau, qvd and tde respectively.

2nd approach (RAM dump) is used in Parquet/Arrow (I use it thru Python/Pandas).

Question - Is there _any_ compressed or RAM optimized format, supported by Power BI?

I mean, free easymorph can read qvd and tde (Tableau), but Power BI can't?

Free python/pandas can read/write RAM optimized files, but Power BI can't?

xlsb (binary Excel) is great, but Power BI is extremely slow with it, even it is the MSFT technology.

Also, Power Bi desktop can't read another pbix (at least I don't know how to do this).

Any suggestions? Thanks!

Re: Any way to read native qvd (Qlik binary format) into Power BI?

marcus_sommer — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 16:57:43 GMT

I'm not an expert with Power BI but I doubt that a data-compression is supported respectively practically useable. Especially as each load is performed per Power Query and by using the desktop client.

Officially recommended for load-speed is to load from structured sources like data-bases which could perform query-folding which means that the main-work is done from the source and only the final data are transferred.

A better performance as with the above mentioned data-base should be possible by using data-flows which means to use a mix of desktop and cloud.

In my experience is Power BI far away from being a BI tool like Qlik - neither in regard to ETL capabilities and performance nor to the development efforts and user-experience.