PowerBI & SharePoint Refresh Speed

[GavinLoyd]

I’ve been experiencing some issues with PowerBI dashboards that use SharePoint lists as data sources. The dashboards are taking 5 or 6 hours to refresh. This occurs even after configuring incremental refresh, which should only be refreshing around 200 rows in the SharePoint list.

These dashboards refresh in under 20 minutes on my desktop. To test whether my query was overly complicated, I built a new report off my biggest SharePoint table. I simply queried the SharePoint List and configured incremental refresh. This report refreshed in 11 minutes on my desktop. However, after uploading it to a premium workspace and refreshing it there, it took almost 3 hours. 

What could cause such latency in the service, while my desktop report refreshes in a small fraction of the time?

[lbendlin · Accepted solution]

This occurs even after configuring incremental refresh, which should only be refreshing around 200 rows in the SharePoint list.

Sharepoint is not a foldable data source, there will be no time difference between full and incremental refresh.

Most likely the SharePoint service is throttling the requests from the Power BI Service  (via 429).  Consider using the Bulk API for SharePoint, or some more targeted OData queries.

[ouaelaam]

I second using Odata queries, they are way faster than the default Sharepoint connector

[GavinLoyd]

Thank you for the advice. Do you have more information on the Bulk API for SharePoint?

[lbendlin]

Make batch requests with the REST APIs | Microsoft Learn