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Is there a way to turn off the BI Engine feature when using Data Studio? My goal is to compare and analyze the value add of BI Engine, like before and after using the BI Engine to accelerate the data studio charts.

Snehal Thorat
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2 Answers2

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If your data is under 1Gb, then your dashboards would be accelerated by BI engine by default using free tier: https://cloud.google.com/bi-engine/pricing#free_tier

If your data is smaller than 1Gb, there is no easy way to disable it today. One way you can workaround that is to use custom query and check "Legacy SQL" checkbox in Data Studio: screenshot. That way BI Engine won't be used.

Alexey Klishin
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Edit: Alexey Klishin is a subject matter expert on this and his answer is a better one.

Original Post:

Yes.

  1. In Data Studio, connect to a BigQuery dataset in a GCP project where you have admin access and create a data source. Do not turn on BI engine.
  2. Create your dashboard using the data source.
  3. Create a second GCP project and copy over the data from the first project. Turn on BI engine (see how to).
  4. Create a second data source in Data Studio from the BigQuery dataset in #3.
  5. Copy the dashboard from #2 and replace the data source with the one from #4.

View dashboards from #2 and #5 to compare performance with and without BI engine. Keep in mind that there will be both Data Studio cache and BigQuery cache for the dashboard from #2. So for this one, performance will vary between the first view and subsequent views.

Minhaz Kazi
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  • Thank you Minhazm, I appreciate your detailed response. In my case, I observed that I was able to see the 'Accelerated with BI Engine' label on my charts even without purchasing/reserving BI Engine capacity. I am assuming it happened because my data was within the 1 GB free tier limit. Is there a way to turn off BI Engine in such cases (when data is below 1 GB free tier) and make that performance comparison I asked in my initial question? – Snehal Thorat May 19 '20 at 15:28
  • See "How to tell if report data is cached" and "Refresh report data manually" here: https://support.google.com/datastudio/answer/7020039?hl=en. Manually refreshing the report should invalidate the cache and will be indicative of report performance without BI engine. – Minhaz Kazi May 19 '20 at 17:59