PowerBI Auto Refresh - powerbi

Good Day
A client I am working with wants to use a PowerBI dashboard to display in their call centre with stats pulled from an Azure SQL Database.
Their specific requirement is that the dashboard automaticly refresh every minute between their operating hours (8am - 5pm).
I have been researching this a bit but can't find a definitive answer.
Is it possible for PowerBI to automaticly refresh every 1min?
Is it dependant on the type of license and/or the type of connection (DIRECTQUERY vs IMPORT)

You can set a report to refresh on a direct query source, using the automatic report refresh feature.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/desktop-automatic-page-refresh
This will allow you to refresh the report every 1 minute or other defined interval. This is report only, not dashboards as it is desktop only.
When publishing to the service you will be limited to a minimum refresh of 30 mins, unless you have a dedicated capacity. You could add an A1 Power BI Embedded SKU and turn it on then off during business hours to reduce the cost. Which would work out around £200 per month.
Other options for importing data would be to set a Logic App or Power Automate task to refresh the dataset using an API call, for a lower level of frequency, say 5 mins. It would be best to optimise your query to return a small amount of pre aggregated data to the dataset.

You can use Power Automate to schedule refresh your dataset more than 48 times a day. You can refresh it every minute with Power Automate, it looks like. I can also see that you may be able to refresh your dataset more frequently than that with other tools.

Refreshing the data with 1 min frequency is not possible in PowerBI. If you are not using powerBI premium than you can schedule upto 8 times in a day, with the minimum gap of 15 minutes. If in case you are using PowerBI premium you are allowed to schedule 48 slots.
If you are not able to compromise with the above restrictions, then it might be worth to look into powerBI reports for streaming datasets. But then again there are some cons to that as well, like they work only with DirectQuery etc etc.

Related

Power BI Incremental Refresh without Service

I need help with improving refresh times on a Power BI dashboard with about 20M rows of data and 80 columns pulling from SQL Server. I cannot use Power BI Service in any capacity, this has to load into Power BI Desktop.
My refresh times on the raw data (virtually no transformations in Power Query) are taking about 3-4 hours.
Microsoft recommends incremental refresh to archive my historical data and only refresh the latest changes, but that requires Service and I 100% cannot use it.
Is there any other way to significantly improve my refresh times beyond Service's incremental refresh? If it was under an hour I'd be happy.
What I've tried:
Native Query to leverage the server
reducing column selections
removing all transformations
Splitting tables in Power Query and selectively turning off refresh in the historical tables - as soon as they get stacked/appended Power Query triggers a refresh on all stacked tables regardless of which ones have refresh turned off.
Looked into Power Query PQFL/M code to activate refresh of tables - can't find any method/property to control this in M code.
optimizing the SQL, haven't gotten any significant improvements.
20 million rows should not take that long, especially with no transformations. Something else is going wrong but without access to your data and hardware, it is impossible to say.
One possibility is do an initial data load and then turn off refresh on that query. Add a new query for just the new data (which should be quick) but load the new query to a completely new table. In PBI, you will then have two tables. Create a calculated table in DAX which is a union of your old, non-refreshed data and your new data. Refreshes should be very quick after your first load but obviously you need to think about how it scales as your data grows.

Refreshing data from SQL in PowerBi

I'm really confused about how i can refresh data that i use in my powerBi.
The data come from a server in SQL, at first time i choosed to use DirectQuery as importation mode, after a litle bit of time i observed that its took time when i want to change things like measure or representations.
So i opted to change directquery to importation in order to gain time.
I would like to know how can i get the newest data from my sql server automaticly, because i have line which is added every day, would i use accrementiel refresh?
Just set up a daily refresh schedule in the Power BI Service. If you have big data with a long history you might also benefit from incremental refresh, but that's alread an optimization step.
Are you aware of power bi gate way ?
Keep your dashboards and reports up to date by connecting to your on-premises data sources without the need to move the data. (https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/gateway/)
You just need to install power bi gateway to your server.
Then you can visit power bi service -> settings -> manage gateway . You can setup new gateway here.
Once you create connection you can schedule refresh time with your UTC time.
Note: you need to buy power bi pro or premium licence for that. Pro licence has 8 times refreshes per day and premium has about 48 times per day(premium is very expensive) .
And their is feature called incremental refresh, you have to setup it prom power bi dashboard.
It may take 10-20 minutes to refresh data set.(mentioned in power bi site)
Hi do you using Power BI desktop?
click on your page not visual, on the visualization you will see,option called page refresh. set this On.
set Refresh type to Auto page refresh.
set Refresh this page every the value you want(seconds,minutes,hours,day).
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Power BI dashboard not updating automatically

Why Power BI service does not refresh data automatically. The forums mention that with Power BI Pro license allows to schedule refresh 8 times and Power BI Premium allows us to schedule refresh with a higher frequency. There is always an option to manually refresh the dataset/dashboard.
Does that mean Power BI does not provide the ability for live reporting.
We are not sure when was the last update for the dashboard.
Please suggest if we have some workaround. Iam using web api as data source.
Real-time reports are possible with push or streaming datasets.
DirectQuery is another possibility for frequently changing data.
What's your connection ? DirectQuery or import in your current report ?
Schedule refresh for your dashboard does not mean your data will refresh, you have to refresh your dataset also, and depending your source if you are using dataflows it will refresh your last dataset update. I'll suggest you to check out guy in the cube channel on youtube.

Custom Realtime Data in PowerBI Dashboards

I am new to the powerbi platform and have a challenge of scoping/converting an old dashboard solution to powerbi.
The old dashboard solution is custom made and refreshes data every minute.
Powerbi lists its refresh rate for 8 times a day for Pro and 48times a day on Enterprice. Does that means there is no option to provide the same realtime (1min) updates in a dashboard using powerbi?
Can you embed iframes or anything in a powerbi dashboard?
How can you do a realtime graph in powerbi if it only refreshes 8 times a day?
Refreshing data 8/48 times a day is applicable when you import data in Power BI dataset. But if you want "more recent" data, you can connect to your data source using DirectQuery mode. DirectQuery sends queries to your data source when rendering the report. If you apply a filter, the database will get a new query, and so on. Not every data source supports DirectQuery, e.g. you can't use it for flat files (obviously). You may want to take a look at Data refresh in Power BI article.
For embedding iframes in Power BI report you can use HTML Viewer custom visual.
By default when using DirectQuery mode, tiles pinned to a dashboard refresh automatically hourly (Datasets in DirectQuery/LiveConnect mode), but you can reduce this time down to 15 minutes:
A tile is a report visual pinned to a dashboard, and dashboard tile refreshes happen about every hour so that the tiles show recent results. You can change the schedule in the dataset settings, as in the screenshot below, or force a dashboard update manually by using the Refresh Now option.
However if you want to display real-time data in Power BI dashboard, it will be better to use push or streaming datasets. With push datasets you can programatically push data to the dataset and the data will be stored and you can use them in reports. Streaming datasets are similar to push, but they will keep only the last hour of data pushed to them and can't be used in report, only pinned to a dashboard. There are also other options, like using PubNub or Microsoft Flow. For more information also take a look at Real-time streaming in Power BI.

Delta updates to dashboard in Power BI

I am looking at retrieving data from an API in Power BI.
I would like to avoid processing all of the data again when I run a refresh. Is there a way to add the new data to the existing data in the dashboard as a delta upload instead of a full refresh every time?
Thanks for any help.
You need to buy Premium for this. Power BI Premium supports Incremental refresh (see announcement and documentation).
With Incremental refresh you define two parameters, RangeStart and RangeEnd, and policies how to refresh the deltas. The values for these parameters are managed by the service. Then first refresh will be slow, because it will load all the data, but next refreshes will only load the data for the period after the last refresh.