Power BI premium workspace refresh rate clarification

[henrychoiyw]

Hi All,

I want to clarify the refresh rate or times for Power BI premium workspace.

From my understanding, premium workspace can refresh 48 times a day and it shared between all the reports within the workspace.

I want to know if DirectQuery falls into the same number of the refresh rate? or there is no limitation with DirectQuery?

I am looking at creating a "nearly-realtime" event registration report for colleagues to monitor the number of people registered for the event.

Thank you very much in advance.

Henry

[Ritaf1983 · Accepted solution]

Hi @henrychoiyw 

You're correct that in a Power BI Premium workspace, scheduled refreshes are limited to 48 refreshes per dataset per day. However, this limitation applies to import mode datasets.

For DirectQuery and Live Connection modes, there is no limitation on the number of refreshes, as these modes query the underlying data source in real time (or near real time). When users interact with a report based on DirectQuery, Power BI sends queries to the data source on-demand, so there’s no need for scheduled refreshes.

However, keep in mind that the performance of DirectQuery depends on the responsiveness of the underlying data source, and frequent queries can impact performance if the data source is slow or under heavy load.

In summary:

• Import mode: Limited to 48 refreshes per day per dataset.
• DirectQuery: No refresh limit, but performance depends on the data source. You can achieve near real-time reporting this way.

This makes DirectQuery a suitable choice for your "nearly real-time" event registration report.

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[henrychoiyw]

Hi Rita,

Thank you very much for your reply.

I want to ask one more thing, if the datasource is Dataverse, is DirectQuery still no refresh limit?

Henry

[Ritaf1983]

Hi @henrychoiyw 
Yes refreshes limitations are the function of import mode , when using DirectQuery mode with Dataverse ( or others )as your data source, there is no refresh limit in the traditional sense, as the data is queried in real-time directly from Dataverse. DirectQuery doesn’t cache data but sends queries to the data source when interacting with the report, so the need for scheduled refreshes is eliminated. However, you should be mindful of potential performance impacts, especially with complex queries or large datasets, as each interaction results in a live query to the Dataverse.

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