1. What query folding means to self-service BI projects
1/18/2019 2:26 AM
What query folding means to self-service BI projects
Ken Puls, FCPA, FCMA, Microsoft MVP
President & CTO, Excelguru Consulting
© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

2. The Impact of Query Folding
Microsoft 2016
1/18/2019 2:26 AM
The Impact of Query Folding
Client’s architecture
~70 million rows stored in SQL (adding ~1 million rows per day)
Self service BI created in Excel and Power BI
The issue
Retrieval and reshaping took hours to execute
BI solution risked getting abandoned
By leveraging Query Folding
Retrieval and reshaping now takes minutes
The solution can actually be used
© 2016 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

3. Would you rather? Connect to the data source and
Retrieve 1 million rows to the Client
Then, in the client application
Remove all rows except Dept 500
Remove all but 3 columns
Group rows by Month End
Land the 2000 rows to a table
Connect to the data source and
Select only rows for Dept 500
Select only 3 columns
Group the rows by Month End
Retrieve 2000 rows to the client
Then, in the client application
Land the 2000 rows to a table
Summary:
Pulls ALL data from the server
Processes with client CPU and RAM
Summary:
Pushes processing to the server
Pulls as little to client as possible

4. What is Query Folding? User interface driven Example:
Query steps are “folded” into consolidated SQL statements
Example:
Connect to table
Remove all columns except MonthEnd, Dept & Amount
Filter to only Dept 500
Group by MonthEnd
SELECT MonthEnd, Dept, Amount
FROM tblTransactions
WHERE Dept=‘500’
Group By MonthEnd
SELECT MonthEnd, Dept, Amount
FROM tblTransactions
WHERE Dept=‘500’
SELECT *
FROM tblTransactions
SELECT MonthEnd, Dept, Amount
FROM tblTransactions

5. What Sources Support Query Folding
Supported
Unavailable
Databases
Any database with a connector
ODBC*
Files
Excel, CSV, Text, etc..
Access databases
Non-supported databases
OLE DB
ODBC*
DON’T GET BURNED! Only use ODBC if a specific connector is not available!

6. Key Goals for Self Service Users
Minimize the data being retrieved
Removing columns
Filtering rows
Removing duplicates
Push “heavy” operations to the server
Grouping
Merging tables (Join operations)
Pivoting or Unpivoting operations

7. Breaking Query Folding
Using data sources that don’t support query folding
Starting from a custom SQL statement
Using complex ‘M’ functions
Buffering tables or lists
Leveraging custom (user defined) functions

8. How to Tell if Query Folding is Active?
Right click a step in the query…
Query Folding is Active
View Native Query is available
Query Folding Broken
View Native Query greyed out

9. Query Folding Demo Ken Puls, FCPA, FCMA, Microsoft MVP
© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.

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1/18/2019 2:26 AM
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11. 1/18/2019 2:26 AM
© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED OR STATUTORY, AS TO THE INFORMATION IN THIS PRESENTATION.