Salesforce Objects timing out almost every time now

[skygriff]

Seems to be getting worst after each upgrade with Power BI.  August 2018 version I could do "refresh all" and after several tries, it will eventually refresh.  Salesforce Reports broke on that release for me, so I upgraded to September 2018 version and that fixed the Salesforce Reports issue where it would never populate in the Navigator pane, but now my Salesforce Object tables just stays "Waiting for..." for minutes than times out.  Now I have to refresh a table one by one, and it will take about 3-5 tries to get it to refresh anything that's from a Salesforce Object.  Anyone else having issues?  

[ShahShlok317]

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

[QueryWhiz]

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. 

[Anonymous]

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.

[Anonymous]

@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

[skygriff]

Sorry just saw your post today and yes that's what I ended up having to do.  I created a new connection to the Salesforce Object (Case Activities) and found that I can filter by dates, but once I do some more advanced transformations it will time out.  It was never like this before, so all the work I did previously in the query editor is no longer working.  So for now I'm just getting by with minimal transformations.  I saw an update published yesterday, do you know if that made any improvements to the Salesforce Object connections?  Thanks!

[Anonymous]

@skygriff,

There is no official articles or blogs stating that there are salesforce object improvements in the new Power BI update. In your scenario, the time out issue is caused by large data and multiple transformations. I would recommend you create measures or calculated columns instead.

Regards,
Lydia

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous @skygriff I'm having these issues as well. I have 3 reports that use Salesforce. All were built months ago, put on schedules and untouched for months. All 3 auto refreshed daily, twice a day, with no issues ever. Microsoft reported issues with Salesforce reports refreshing twice last month and that they had been taken care of, but my reports have never been the same since. 2 of them I can still successfully refresh at the desktop level, then publish to the service. The other report won't even do that anymore, and I have to refresh each table individually and skip over the two Salesforce tables that won't load. When I try to refresh them individually, I get this and it just never goes anywhere:

 

It's frustrating because I spent months building these, they refreshed fine on their own for months, now I'm having these issues out of nowhere after microsoft went down and there seems to be no answer to the fix anywhere. They claimed they have fixed the issue but I've never been able to recover.

[onionnoodle]

Did you resolve this