When using Power BI Premium or Premium Per user you get the option to backup the database, there can be occasions when you try and restore the backup and it fails.

The reason that it could fail is because when a restore happens it can consume additional memory which would take you up and over the memory limit.

Below I will explain a new option which allow this to restore successfully!

If that happens you would get the error below.

This is what it looks like when I tried to restore a Power BI Premium dataset using SQL Server management studio.

The new option to use is the ForceRestore option. This is detailed in the Microsoft documentation below.

Backup and restore Power BI Premium datasets – Power BI | Microsoft Learn

To do this I had to put in the option in the restore syntax as shown below where there is the option for ForceRestore

Here is the JSON Syntax

{
"restore": {
"database": "Large_DB_Restore_Test",
"file": "/LargeRestoreTest.abf",
"allowOverwrite": true,
"security": "copyAll",
"forceRestore": true
}
}

Here is the XMLA Syntax

<Restore xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2003/engine">
    <File>/LargeRestoreTest.abf</File>
    <DatabaseName>Large_DB_Restore_Test</DatabaseName>
    <AllowOverwrite>true</AllowOverwrite>
    <ForceRestore xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/analysisservices/2022/engine/922">true</ForceRestore>
</Restore>

Once I ran the script above the restore then completed successfully.

Summary

Thanks for reading, I hope that you now have an option to restore a large Power BI database backup.

Any questions or comments please let me know.