Forum Discussion

kenab's avatar
kenab
Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
10 years ago

PowerBI Desktop Refresh - timeout or fails, or SLOW

I LOVE PowerBI...

I use PowerBI Desktop for all my report creation. Many of these reports have daily iterations, which require me to update the data quite regularly in PowerBI Desktop. I am connected to an on-prem SQL Data Warehouse and several different tables for all the different report data. PROBLEM: I consistently get timed out when trying to update the data from within PowerBI Desktop. I end up having to update each individual table separately which is VERY time consuming, even these individual updates can each take quite some time to update (very inconsistent, sometimes a 33K line table will updated in 3 minutes, other times, it will updated in 3 SECONDS...) Any ideas to help optimize these updates?

I am using PowerBI Enterprise Gateway for daily updates to the data, but as you know, when I edit the report in PowerBI Desktop, I access a non-updated file, hence the need to update the file. If only I could access the file that is updated by the Enterprise Gateway....that would save me some time, but that does not solve my problem.  Ideas please?

8 Replies

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable
    10 years ago

    kenab I'm assuming there is a reason for not using Direct Query? - this would resolve the load issues.

    Also, what sort of memory do you have on your machine? That will directly impact how fast things load each time... Do you have other processes running at times and other times nothing but Power BI?

    • kenab's avatar
      kenab
      Icon for Microsoft Employee rankMicrosoft Employee
      10 years ago

      I use DAX heavily in places, so direct query is not the best option.  Also, hundreds of peple will access these reports on a daily basis, our Data Warehouse could not handle the traffic.

      Desktop machine is i5 1.7 with 8gigs of ram.  Not a bad little machine.

      No other processes running (well, occasionally IE11 is running to update refresh stuff for other files in PowerBI), this machine is ONLY for PowerBI Desktop.  I remote desktop connect to it from my other production machine.  This machine is logged in with a services account.  This makes publishing reports much easier and they are associated with this services account, and not my email address..

      Other ideas?

      • ianbarker's avatar
        ianbarker
        Icon for Helper III rankHelper III
        10 years ago

        Hi kenab

         

        Are you by any chance using any Power Query/M in your queries?

        Are you doing any merges, filters or anything like that ahead of doing your DAX?

         

        I've found that if you are doing anything other than selecting a table in the Query Editor it causes timeouts, fails, and just general slowness so I now avoid doing anything to shape the data in the query editor first.