Desktop refresh vs gateway refresh on service

Hi aj1973 

Many thanks for your suggestion - I appreciate your help.  My use of DAX for the transformation of some of the data was expedient for two reasons.  I had used that successfully in the past and it was quicker to be able to text-edit a formula to drop into 'create table' commands than to go through the process of adding transformation steps in Power Query. 

However, expedient isn't always best! 

As the removal of DAX seemed to help in the instance on that other thread I deleted all my tables created in DAX.  As a test and before trying to recreate the transformations in Power Query, I saved and published the dataset just with all DAX removed.  Once again, the desktop refresh went fine but the refresh in the service hogged resources and timed out.  

I cannot easily regress the Gateway version and I cannot change the SQL Server version.  I have checked our Gateway and it is not the current version.  I have considered updating the Gateway to the current version but it is demanding a .NET Framework version update.  That's well above me, so I've referred that on.  

I'm keeping an open mind.  I'm far from expert with Power BI, but I'm inclined to think if the refresh in Desktop can be successful and relatively quick that I can't have made too much of a mess of my methods of importing and transforming data.  Our Gateway version is 3000.66.4 (November 2020 Release 1) so we're not far out of date on that.  Whether updating it to 3000.77.7 (which seems to be the current version) will be significant, I don't know, but it seems worth trying.  I'll update the thread with actions/outcomes as they unfold.  

Cheers

mmilegal