Hello Community,
I have an online refresh failure where we were able to identify the root cause and fix it. However, I believe it to be a bug and wanted to know if anyone else has experienced this.
Background:
We have Premium Capacity and leverage a data gateway.
The Issue:
We leverage the technique of creating surrogate keys for all of our dimensions and then use merge statements to 'join' the dimensions back to the fact table where we then only display the surrogate key created. We have been using this technique for almost a year and have never experienced an issue until now.
The surrogate key created on the dimesnion tables is nothing more than the Index Column and we completely use the GUI to do the build.
The solution refreshes fine locally, no issues.
However, when we publish it online, we get errors and it doesnt refresh. Reading thru the cryptic error messages we determined that the error is ocurring on Index Column creation. The gist of the error is that it refers to the Index Column step indicating that a function was pass 5 parameters when it was expecting 2.
Reading thru the Mcode we realize that PowerBI is now inserting an additional step when creating the Index Column, it is changing the data type to Int64.Type. This change is causing the issue, in bold below.
= Table.AddIndexColumn(#"Trimmed Text", "Index", 1, 1, Int64.Type)
We are not sure when Microsoft introduced this change, but we are certain that it was a recent change because since we have leveraged this technique for a year we can go back to prior builds and see that using the GUI Index Column use to only produce this Mcode
= Table.AddIndexColumn(#"Trimmed Text", "Index", 1, 1)
The Fix:
We modified the existing PBIX file, removing the Int64.Type reference from the Mcode, and the soltuion now refreshes online with no issue.
The Question:
Has anyone else experienced this or possibly explain what has changed and why this is occuring? We will be creating a ticket with Microsoft as we do not believe that using the GUI to create an Index should cause any errors when refreshing online.
