How to manually refresh several datasets at once

[sbeste]

I'm evaluating Power BI for my company. I run a data warehouse that has 70 workbooks that have been published and need to be refreshed every month. 

1. I have to refresh all 70 at one time as, say, "The November data".
2. I can't do this on a schedule because sometimes some of the data is late; sometimes it's early and managers want it ASAP.
3. But I don't want to sit there and manually launch 70 refreshes. I need a way to refresh them all as a single manually-launched batch job.

How?

Thanks - Steve

[GilbertQ · Accepted solution]

Hi @sbeste

What I would suggest doing is to use the Power BI Refresh API, and create one PowerShell script per data refresh.

Then you could create a batch file that would then go and call all the PowerShell scripts?

I am not an expert with PowerShell and scripting, so there might be a more elegant way, but the above should work.

Here is a blog post from Chuck on the Power BI team, who details how to get it working.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/charles_sterling/2017/06/29/running-the-power-bi-refresh-apis-headl...

[sbeste]

That'll work! I didn't know about the Refresh API, but it has the key bits. Thank you for the link, too.

Once again, I'm amazed at the ability of this community to deliver fast, detailed answers. This is awesome!

Steve

[GilbertQ]

Hi @sbeste

Just test it manually so that you know it will work for one, and then you can roll it out to all your other datasets that need to be refreshed. But as long as you put in the required bits it should work seamlessley.

And it is a pleasure to help you out, I often come here to find answers, a real great resource!