A few weeks back MVP Paul Turley blogged on Power Query performance and diagnostics. It was a good, useful post, but I wasn’t really the target audience and I probably would have forgotten about it if it weren’t for one thing.

This diagram.

Look at it.

Look at it again, and pause to thoughtfully consider its elegance and beauty.

In the time since Paul shared this post, I’ve been involved in any number of conversations^[1] where customer stakeholders had questions about Power BI application performance. This type of conversation isn’t particularly new, but now I’ve started using this diagram^[2] as a point of reference.

The results have been very positive. Although nothing in the diagram is new or particularly interesting on its own, having this simple visual reference for the components that make up the canonical end-to-end flow in a Power BI application have made my conversations more useful and productive. Less time is required to get all stakeholders to a point of shared understanding – more time can be devoted to identifying and solving the problem.

I don’t know if Paul truly appreciates the beauty of what he’s created. But I do. And you should too.

^[1] In case you’ve been wondering why my blog and YouTube output has dried up this month, it’s because real life has been kicking my ass. I think I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, so hopefully we’ll be back with regular content before too long. Hopefully.

^[2] This beautiful, simple, elegant diagram.