Forum Discussion
Dataset refresh via Power Automate Flow - clarifications
Hi mollycat ,
Unfortunately, there’s no sneaky way around this one in Premium capacity, anything that refreshes your dataset via Power Automate (or any other API) does count toward the 48-per-day limit for that dataset, even if you trigger it manually with a button inside the report. The only refreshes that don’t count are when you (or someone with permission) click REFRESH NOW in the Power BI Service. The good news is you can add a Power Automate button in the report so end users can kick off a refresh themselves it just means each click will still eat into that 48-refresh daily quota. If you really need more than 48 automated/API refreshes a day, the only real workaround today is to go through the XMLA endpoint, which doesn’t have the same cap.
More details here in Microsoft’s official documentation: Data refresh in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
Hope that clears things up. If the above solution works for you, please accept it as the solution so that other community members with similar issues can benefit.
Regards,
Akhil.
Hi mollycat ,
Really glad that helped. Let me go through your follow-ups one at a time.
- Manual refresh in the App
Yep, you’ve got it right that “manual refresh” I was talking about is only something you can do in the workspace itself. Once the report is in an App, that button just isn’t there, even if the person has the right permissions and the gateway set up. - XMLA endpoint
I’ve used XMLA quite a bit. It’s super flexible and will happily get around the 48/day limit, but it’s a bit more “hands-on” than Power Automate. You’re usually writing TMSL scripts or using SSMS/PowerShell, so it’s more technical. The main things I’ve learned:
- Make sure you’ve got the right access set up for whoever’s running it.
- Keep an eye on overlapping refreshes so you don’t accidentally overload the capacity.
- Treat access carefully XMLA can do a lot more than just refresh.
If you’re fine with a bit of scripting, it’s a solid option.
- What happens if you hit the 48 limit
When you reach that cap, Power BI will just say “nope” to any more API/flow refreshes that day. The refresh fails, you’ll see it in the refresh history, and the dataset owner (plus anyone else set to get alerts) will get an email saying it failed. The error message is pretty clear that you’ve gone over the limit.
Hope that clears things up, and nice to hear you’re already digging into XMLA it’s worth the time if refresh frequency is a big deal for you.
Thanks,
Akhil.
Amazing, thank you SO much Anonymous, this is extremely helpful!
Hello Anonymous, I've done some additional research in the time from our last exchange and have a few more questions, if you don't mind 🙂
- This report was actually set up originally in Direct Query mode to avoid the need for the refresh schedule consideration. When in Import mode, the data refresh takes about 20 seconds, which I'm assuming would be similar to load the data via Direct Query. However, the time it takes to reload the report visual (a Matrix and some filters) is extremely slow...making the report basically unusable. I'm wondering if pivoting back to Direct Query is worthwhile if there is a way to improve the report visual reload performance?
- If not, and the best method is to move forward with Import mode (again, semantic model refresh is very fast, so that is not a limitation), do you know if any of the Fabric features that are currently in preview mode may help solve this? I'm looking at Refresh a Semantic Model Using Data Pipelines (Preview) - Power BI | Microsoft Learn and, while I'm open to the XMLA endpoint, I wonder if something out of the box will be more sustainable longterm, assuming of course that this would allow 48+ refreshes.
Thank you, Akhil!
