Salesforce Objects timing out almost every time now

Hi!

I can attest to also having the same problem. Work done in the quey editor, reports and dashboards with a lot of time gone into them will have to ba built from scratch. The Salesforce Report API is of scant value with the 2000 rows limitation and the Salesforce Objects API is also rapidly becoming useless as it will break when you are tryning to refresh data. 

The answer cannot simply be that the customers need to build their reports in a clever way to overcome a performance limitation. The two big, profitable actors involved (Salesforce and Microsoft) who are charging big bucks for licensees should own up to their responsibilities and fix this.

skygriff,

Do you make serveral transformations in Query Editor of Power BI Desktop? If so, please create a new PBIX that just get the tables data with no transformation and see what's happen.

Also please post fiddler trace log of the refresh issue here.

Regards,
Lydia

Hi skygriff were you able to find a solution? As a workaround, maybe you can try to test your connection with a 3rd party connector, which pulls data from the SF objects API, I haven't had any issue with it so far. I've tried windsor.ai, supermetrics, and funnel.io. I stayed with Windsor because it is much cheaper so just to let you know other options. In case you wonder, to make the connection first search for the Salesforce connector in the data sources list:

After that, just grant access to your Salesforce account using your credentials, then on preview and destination page you will see a preview of your Salesforce fields:

There just select the fields you need. It is also compatible with custom fields and custom objects, so you'll be able to export them through windsor.  Finally, just select PBI as your data destination and finally just copy and paste the url on PBI --> Get Data --> Web --> Paste the url. 

Hi all -

The real culprit here is the time of response from Salesforce. This is not a proper solution but a symptom of it that will work as a bandaid solution. Below is how you can edit your heavy object queries from powerquery using M code.

For your query that is timing out -

• Open the Advanced Editor in power query
• In the Source step, add time out duration: After salesforce link ,[ApiVersion=48, Timeout=#duration(0, 0, 120, 0)]),
• This will override the default source response limit from 10 mins to 120 mins which is max allowed.
• This alone won't resolve the issue, make sure that your next query steps are basic such as removed other columns. Any heavy transformations on rows or data types will fail the load. I personally only have the source, navigation and removed other columns steps.
• Add timeouts for all the big objects that are failing the scheduled refreshes. Even though the total time limit allowed for all queries together on a PRO capacity is 120 mins, it will help all the queries that are taking time to load.

Thank you.

Kind Regards,

Shlok

Hi skygriff,

The timeout appears after more complex Power Query transformations. Test one Salesforce object without transformations, then add the steps back gradually to find the problematic one.

Salesforce.Data supports a configurable timeout, but increasing it may only delay the failure.

Power BI Connector for Salesforce by Metrica Software provides another extraction path with field selection, filters, preview, and SOQL: https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=31526f0e-abd8-4cb5-bd1a-3bd56b5c0577

Reducing the exported data may improve refresh performance, but it cannot guarantee a fix.

Cheers,
Metrica Team