Forum Discussion
Microsoft EmployeeShare your thoughts on Automatic Page Refresh aka APR (Preview feature)
We have been asking for something like this for a few years, so glad that it is finally available to us. But - the happiness had a short duration. We went with Power BI over competitors due to the flexibility and ease of setting up displays for our business that would allow a separation between IT and the super users at the facilities = IT provides the database access and views and the super users develop and maintain their visual displays themselves. This worked great when we updated the Power BI desktop, enabled the APR feature, updated the displays. We have an on prem gateway so published our changes there - only to find that the refresh was not happening on our display boards. We have mostly basic users and a few pro licenses for those who maintain the displays.
I assume that the issue is due to not having a premium capacity - so even though we want to refesh the displays once a minute or so (like an airport status display), they only refresh every 15 minutes once published. Would be useful if the non-premium on prem gateway could refresh more often than 15 minutes - a minute would be best for us - don't have to go down to the second. Our directquery access to the database is a second or so due to a small set size, so the 15 minute limit isn't avoiding any capacity/workload issues.
The price increase to premium makes Power BI a more expensive product than many competitors that provide near real time refreshes.
Microsoft EmployeeSorry for delayed response davebi. You're not alone in this feedback. We are trying really hard to find ways to make this time for Power BI Pro shorter. Surprisingly, the Premium restriction is not related to pricing but to resources and there's a lot that we need to do with this feature before we can even think about reducing the limitation on time. Thanks for the candid feedback and if you can, it would be great to have this request logged at https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas
We are looking for something like once a minute, so the resources shouldn't be an issue. We try to do the resource intensive logic in the ERP so the table lookups (direct query) from Power BI is fast. We tested with refreshing every 10 seconds on the desktops and it kept up without any issues. We are looking into upgrading to Premium but trying to justify the cost. We are still early in the visual display dashboard rollout so hard to justify the high monthly cost for two facilities. We understand that if this project gets some traction and we start adding it to multiple facilities, the need would be present for premium due to the increased processing requirements - but would also be able to spread the cost between more divisions - making the ROI worthwhile.
One question about premium. We are currently negotiating the new licensing for 2020 for all microsoft products and the saleman stated 48 refreshes per day under premium using direct query. Is this old information? I would think that the APR opens up the ability to do much more than 48/day - we're planning more than 48 per hour. Just want to be sure before we make the investment.
- MiguelMartinez
Hi Dave, that is correct. Once you have premium basically you decide how often you want to refresh and what limits to set up. Next month we have some features comming out that will allow to have more fficiency on how APR works, but based on your comments and questions Premium will cover the scenario you mention. Just remember APR only suports DQ sources and only fires the queries when the report is active.