Forum Discussion
Automatic refreshes never pull in changes (UPDATED)
We incrementally refresh our semantic model every 30 minutes using the services's scheduler. As far as I know, scheduled refreshes perform a refresh type Automatic. This works fine.That makes little sense as the smallest partition is a daily partition. You will want to look into keeping the "today" partition in direct query mode.
Note: For your API refreshes you should replace "automatic" with "full" to force the refresh.
Hi markmsc,
Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Fabric Community Forum. Also, thanks to lbendlin, for his inputs on this thread.
The behaviour you’re seeing is expected with Automatic refreshes. Power BI only reprocesses partitions that aren’t already marked as Ready. If a partition is in the “Ready” state, the service assumes it’s up to date and skips it even if the source data has changed. That’s why scheduled refreshes work later, but on-demand automatic ones appear to do nothing.
Detect data changes: Make sure your incremental refresh policy uses a proper change-tracking column (e.g., ModifiedDate). This tells Power BI which partitions need refreshing. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/power-bi/connect-data/incremental-refresh-overview#detect-data-changes
Query folding: Verify that filters on RangeStart and RangeEnd are folding to the source. If not, incremental logic may skip updates. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/power-bi/connect-data/incremental-refresh-troubleshootPartition states: If partitions stay in “Ready,” Automatic refresh will skip them. You can confirm this via XMLA endpoint or Tabular Editor.
If you need data immediately, you can: Trigger a Full or Data Only refresh via the REST API instead of “Automatic.” Or update the change-tracking column in the source so the partition is re-evaluated. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/rest/api/power-bi/datasets/refresh-datasetHope this clears it up. Let us know if you have any doubts regarding this. We will be happy to help.
Thank you for using the Microsoft Fabric Community Forum.
We incrementally refresh our semantic model every 30 minutes using the services's scheduler. As far as I know, scheduled refreshes perform a refresh type Automatic. This works fine.That makes little sense as the smallest partition is a daily partition. You will want to look into keeping the "today" partition in direct query mode.
Note: For your API refreshes you should replace "automatic" with "full" to force the refresh.
I've delayed following up because I wanted to monitor things for a few days. And I have never, not once, seen even the dirtiest of partitions be marked as anything other than "Ready". I really can't imagine a scenario where Automatic would actually do anything.
This is puzzling, because I was told her on the forum some ago that the service's scheduled refreshes performance an Automatic. That can't be true, seemingly, or our scheduled refreshes would never actually refresh a table -- but they do.
I have changed everything to Full as you suggest, and which is clearly the correct answer, and our API refreshes are working now. It's odd though: it feels like the scheduled refreshes aren't doing Full either, simply because a scheduled refresh can update our entire 30+ table model in not too much more total time than one of our programmatic API refreshes can do a more narrowly-targeted ~5 tables.
Frustrating behavor overall, but at least our targeted refreshes are working now.
