Load vs Not Load Linked Entities

[bcdobbs]

Hi,

I'm wondering if someone can point me in the direction of something to read or shed some light on how the behaviour of a linked entity changes when it is loaded vs not loaded.

Scenario:

I have 2 dataflows that ingest data.

One has some dimension tables.

The other contains a few million rows

of raw data.

Then in a 3rd dataflow I bring in entities from both as linked entities and merge them to get the Ids from the dimension tables.

If I let it run in that state everything works ok. However given I only want the end result after transformations I told it not to load the linked tables in order to hide them. It all looks ok but then the refresh fails about 5 minutes in with a message about DirectQuery reaching an unexpected end.

I'm trying to understand what is happening behind the scenes and therefore what is breaking.

[v-jingzhang]

Hi @bcdobbs 

I couldn't reproduce this error. I did a test that used Choose data source > Other > Blank table to create two Dim tables in a dataflow, then created the second dataflow with the same method. In the third dataflow, I brought tables from the first two dataflows as linked tables and merged two linked tables to create a computed table. At last, I unchecked Enable load option for the linked tables and refreshed the third dataflow. The refresh succeeded without any error. 

Did you use any feature involving DirectQuery with dataflows in Power BI? As your error message includes "DirectQuery reaching an unexpected end". I haven't tested DirectQuery yet. 

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Jing