Google BI Engine with Data Studio performance comparison

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.