Immidiate refresh in Power BI Premium

[davidz106]

Hello,

I'm currently working on optimizing our data refresh strategy in Power BI to achieve near-real-time data availability for editing and sharing immediately after the data is available in db. According to Power BI's documentation, there could be a delay of up to 30 minutes for certain types of refreshes, even with Power BI Pro or Premium licenses. Our goal is to minimize this delay as much as possible to ensure our users have access to the most up-to-date data.

Given this context, I have a few questions:

1. Data Refresh Configuration: What are the best practices for configuring data refresh settings in Power BI Pro or Premium to achieve the closest to real-time data refresh? Are there specific settings or configurations that can help reduce the refresh delay?
   
   

2. Alternatives and Workarounds: In cases where the 30-minute delay is unavoidable, have any of you found creative alternatives or workarounds to provide users with up-to-date data?

[davidz106]

How does the directquery work though? I work with very large SQL tables. In current system (DASH Plotly) I had multiple dropdowns (6 to be precise). Each of those have filtered my dataset - the sqlalchemy query to get the data for the plots contatained filters for all of those 6 dropdowns. As you can imagine I got a very narrow scope of the original table. 

I cannot imagine importing the whole table in powerbi with Directquery. How would someone approach this? With views in SQL db - that would probably mean thousands of those... 

[Jonvoge · Accepted solution]

Hi davidz106

If you really need real-time data, are one of the following options perhaps a possibility for you?

• Using DirectQuery data connections: Use DirectQuery in Power BI Desktop - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
• Streaming or Push Datasets: Real-time streaming in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
• And if you are using Fabric, you could use DirectLake as well: Learn about Direct Lake in Power BI and Microsoft Fabric - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

All of the above eliminates the need for refreshing your data model to get new data in. Only in case of meta data changes (new columns, changed columns) a refresh is needed.

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