Dataflows (Preview) in Power BI Service has been landed yesterday (6th November 2018). I had a little bit of difficulties to enable this cool new feature so I thought it is good to write a Quick tip about it. While Dataflows is under preveiw at the time of writing this quick tip, the situation may be totally different in the future.

Straight away, fully featured Dataflows is available in a Power BI Premium capacity or in a Power BI Embedded Capacity, but, while this is still in preview, you can take advantage of limited features available in your Power BI Pro license. Features like “Linked entities from other dataflows” or “Computed Entities”, like merging tables to a new table, are not available in a Power BI Pro license.

Enabling Dataflows

• After sign in to Power BI Service click “Settings”
• Click “Admin Portal”

• Select Capacity type you are in, either Premium or Embedded
• Click on a desired capacity that you’d like to enable Dataflows

• Scroll down to find and click “Workloads” under “More Options”
• Enable “Dataflows (Preview)”
• If you stick to the default “Max Memory (%)” value that is set to 20 you’ll get an error message saying “There was an issue updating your workload setting. Try again in a little while”. The error message is not helpful at all. The reason you get the error message is that the “Max Memory (%)” value must be a number between 27 to 100 while the default is 20.

• Set the number to 50 then click Apply

• After you successfully enabled Dataflows you’ll that the status of Dataflows changes to “Active”

Again, this is vaid for very early version of Dataflows and may not be applicable in the future.