Cleaning up a model

A first scan of a long-lived model often lists hundreds of findings. This is one way to work through them. The examples use the committed AdventureWorks sample; run them from the root of a clone of this repository.

1. Get the overview

ripbi scan "samples/AdventureWorks Sales.pbip" --summary

--summary prints counts per object type and the tables with the most findings, so you can start where the most cleanup is. Add --sort size to a PBIX or .abf scan to list the findings that cost the most memory first (see Storage sizes).

2. Work through one type at a time

ripbi scan "samples/AdventureWorks Sales.pbip" --type measure

Each finding says why nothing keeps it alive. ← only used by … (also unused) means the whole chain can go together. What counts as unused explains the rules.

3. Check what the scan cannot see

Before you delete anything, ask whether something outside these reports uses the object: a thin report in another workspace, an Excel pivot, an XMLA client. To see everything that depends on an object and everything it depends on:

ripbi deps "'Sales'[Average Sales per Order]" --model "samples/AdventureWorks Sales.SemanticModel" --impact

A workspace-monitoring query log shows what other clients actually queried; pass it with --queries-from and those objects stop being findings.

4. Keep what is unused on purpose

Mark an object that a consumer ripbi cannot see reads with a ripbi_keep annotation in the model, with the reason as its value (see Keeping objects on purpose). For whole families of objects ripbi should not judge, add an ignore pattern to ripbi.toml.

5. Remove the rest

Delete the objects in Power BI Desktop, Tabular Editor, or the TMDL files. With tomix, remove the whole list as one change (see Removing with tomix):

ripbi scan --emit tx-rm | tx rm --from - ./Model.SemanticModel --save

Then scan again: removing objects can make others unused, such as a key column whose only relationship is gone.

6. Keep it clean

Add the scan to CI so that a pull request fails only when it adds a finding; old findings never block it. See CI in five minutes.