Forum Discussion
Refresh Timeout Error.
Hi. Power Bi Pro has a limit of 2 hours to refresh your data.if you exceed that time you can't continue. This can happen for different reasons like bandwitdh (if you have a gateway) or dataset size.
You have to consider reading about downsizing data model. You can find amazing youtube videos from guy in a cube and others in order to make your model smaller. Usually making a good star schema helps.
Another thing you can check is if your source is returning the data fast. You might have a big crazy native query to the source that takes a lot. Those scenarios might need a middle store procedure building a table in the data base engine in order to help Power Bi only reading the resulted table and avoiding running a complex query.
If you are on premise you can also check bandwidth but that might be the last option because the first two I have mentioned are the most common issues.
I hope that make sense,
Hi ibarrau , Thank you so much for your reply.
Everything you mentioned makes sense and I have taken care of every point you have mentioned and also the dataset has a large amount of data. Is there any other way by which I can refresh the dataset?
If you are sure you have an amazing star schema connected to a source that runs fast single tables (not native query with logics) and you still have 2 hours limit, then you should consider a different license like PPU (premium per user) or moving dataset to Analysis Services. There is also a premium license. If you are sure you have optimized all then the limit can't be skipped, that's showing you that Pro License is not enought for your model.
I know incremental refresh is now available for Pro, but I'm not sure if that will let you skip this limit. You can try it if you have a DB source with Query folding (SQL server, Synapse, postgress, etc).
I hope that helps,
Thanks a lot for your response. So, does this mean that the only way to counter the 2hrs limit is to move to a higher license? If yes, will moving to Power BI Embedded help?
And also I'm facing one more weird issue which is when I publish the dataset (Incremental Refresh is configured) to the service then usually the initial refresh should be triggered on its own but this doesn't seem to happen currently...
If you want to expend the 2 hours limit yes, you need a new license. You can do it with embed, I think that AAS is a cheaper option (but it includes migration) or if there are not so much people shared PPU might be cheaper too.
Regarding the second question I'm sorry but I'm not sure about the answer. However I think there Patrick from Guyinacube youtube channel mentioned that in one of his videos. You might want to check his incremental refreshes videos before jumping to embed capacity.
Regards