Forum Discussion
Dataflow Scheduled Refresh option Greyed Out
thanks m-colbert. Good to hear it's an actual issue and not some weird data source conflict. In general I've had no issues with data flows because I keep them spreadout and manageable. In general I think the slow speed in refreshing flows and datasets, and the purposeful time-out limitations, does result in a poor experience and an obvious money-grab from microsift. But I still opt for the poorer experience that I can control end-to-end than the big-company beurocracy of siloing these functions. I have access to Alteryx and Tableau but opt for BI becasue I need approval for Alteryx application, approval to schedule Alterx workflows, approval to create Tableua reports, etc. It's a larger headache to jump through those hoops.
Anonymous
Are you on premium capacity? Ever since Prem Gen 2 went GA we have intermittent days when no dataflows will refresh for most of the morning. Then magically they start again. Support is worthless on this issue since it's caused by the supposedly superior Gen 2.
Known issue - Long running, failed or stuck dataflow in Premium Gen2 - Power BI | Microsoft Docs
I have had to move some dataflows to a workspace that is outside our capacity just to get them to refresh reliably. And guess what, the dataflows refresh without error and also very consistent in terms of duration. In Prem Gen 2 I have wild swings in refresh times, from an avg of 4 min with highs of over an hour, with many times being 20 min. We never had any of these issues before MS split the workloads and started this new Gen 2 sharing across regions. At least before I felt like I had some semblance of control. Now, when the sh#@ hits the fan I can only sit around and wait.
It's hard to imagine they forced everyone with a Prem capacity to move to Gen2. Maybe some premium tenants don't have this problem, but when you do it will always strike at the most inopportune time. And it's been nearly 8 months of this issue!!!
And then this latest one pops up. I know the grass is always greener, but why do we pay so much to get premium capacity features and then can't use them. 😞
Nope just a pro user. I pull almost exclusively from Salesforce and SharePoint and from my experience most of the delays came from pulling down the detail tables to then be crunched, grouped, trended, etc. I use dataflows almost exclusively to just pull down the detail. I do some light clean up but otherwise its to make the data readily available.
Almost all my dataflows complete with 10 minutes and the few bigger ones may take 40 min. Everything is then pulled into a dataset which is where the crunching happens. That takes about 40 min or so to schedule refresh (8 minutes on desktop).
All my reports feed from that dataset.
It's not perfect, nor industry standard I'd assume, but I'm essentially an analytics team of one and own all the metrics and analysis for my business line.