Forum Discussion
Data refreshes in Power BI Pro
The limit is set for Scheduled Refreshes per dataset.
Manual refreshes through the Service, or APIs are not included. These can also be used to trigger refreshes when needed.
Ie. you could set up a Power Automate flow to trigger a refresh based on user input.
Benni
Hi vinoothna9,
In the Power BI Service, you can schedule as many Scheduled Refreshes on different datasets on the same timeslot as you want, each with their limited number of refreshes. There's probably a limit somewhere, but you'd have to put some real effort into it, to be hindered by it.
A few things to keep in mind..
- If those datasets connect to the same datasource, the datasource also needs to be able to handle the parallel requests, or you'll end up with degraded dataset refresh performance
- The time you specify when scheduling the dataset refresh in Power BI Pro, is an approximate timeslot. There's a 15 minute window in which they'll try to execute the refresh, with up to one hour delay if there's high pressure for resources in the Service (Info in Docs). It's very likely that those 8 refreshes are not executed on the same timestamp.
Also, it is considered best practice to spread out your scheduled refreshes accross a time window, to avoid having bottlenecks.
Benni
The limit is set for Scheduled Refreshes per dataset.
Manual refreshes through the Service, or APIs are not included. These can also be used to trigger refreshes when needed.
Ie. you could set up a Power Automate flow to trigger a refresh based on user input.
Benni
Just want to call out that currently API refreshes ARE included in the 8 refresh-per-day limit. It is not true that you can refresh a dataset more than 8 times a day using the API.
Per the Power BI REST API documentation linked to in the original comment:
"Limitations
- For Shared capacities, a maximum of eight requests per day, including refreshes executed by using scheduled refresh, can be initiated."
Per the Power Automate Guidance linked to in the original comment:
"Existing limits on refreshes apply when running the refresh dataset action in Microsoft Flow. For datasets in shared capacity used by Power BI Pro, your refresh action is limited to eight refreshes per day (including refreshes executed via Scheduled Refresh)."