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Moehimby
Helper II
Helper II

Refresh fails in DESKTOP but works in service, have to manually refresh some tables

Hey all, seems I'm like the only person to experience this but I have a big hairy report, it has so many tables and connections in it I've almost lost count.

 

It refreshes perfectly fine in the online service, takes about 8 minutes to fully refresh each morning. However, if I have to work with it I can't do a full refresh in desktop without it failing, and when it fails it usually sites and "error in step : merge columns in....", however if I open that table and step through it it's perfectly fine, no errors. Also, the error messages are different each time.

 

The only way for me to refresh in the desktop is to manually refresh tables one-by-one until it just works again and does a full refresh. It's very annoying.

 

Usually, I need to refresh the big FACT tables manually, and then the rest will work.

 

Here's a couple of points :

- Semantic model includes SQL tables, sharepoint excel sheets and Analysis Cube connections

- Refreshes perfectly fine online everyday

- I have to manually refresh single tables until it will finally allow a full auto refresh all

- Usually, after I have manually refreshed the FACT tables it will work

- The FACT tables are mostly all Analysis Cube connections (maybe this is why???)

 

It's really annoying and takes up so much time to have to manually refresh until it allows a full refresh. Help?!

2 REPLIES 2
samratpbi
Super User
Super User

Hi, I also face similar issues many times with large data models with many tables, relationships and reference tables and many Power Query transformations. I think when we try to do full refresh desktop tries to validate everything which consumes quite a few memories. I also noticed, recently this has increased compared to a few years back. Now, either due to my laptop is getting older or in recent Power BI versions, some additional things has been introduced.

DaleT
Helper I
Helper I

Hi,

Can you share the full error message? Did you do a lot operations in Power Query? For example, join two or more tables, look up value from another table.

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