Sudden refresh failure: "The data provider was unable to convert the value..."

[curtissmith]

Hi All,

I received the following refresh failure notice: 

Failure details: The following system error occurred: Type mismatch. Unable to convert a value to the data type requested for table 'All_Facilities_Blanks' column 'xCoord'. The data provider was unable to convert the value '' from the source data type 'VT_BSTR' to the expected data type 'VT_R8'.

I'm not quite sure why since this particulate dataset has been used without issues for over a year at this point. To troubleshoot, I ended up deleting the problem field since I wasn't using it, but another field would pop up in the error notice, so it looks like Power BI/Power Query/something is suddenly having an issue with converting columns that contain nulls into numbers. However, there aren't any issues when I refresh manually in Desktop - everything loads totally fine, it's only when the refresh happens online. If I refresh on Desktop then publish all of the data gets loaded as expected with no issues. 

This has been happening the last few days out of the blue. Nothing in our data changed - the last time data was added to the SQL Server was 2 days before the error occurred, and our refresh is set to happen daily. It really seems that suddenly nulls are an issue. Has anyone else had this happen recently?

Thanks!

[GilbertQ]

Hi @curtissmith 

Can you make sure that you have got the latest version of the Power BI Gateway installed?

[curtissmith]

@GilbertQ Sorry, I'm ignorant as to how I might do that - I don't have the gateway on my personal machine. 

Thanks!

[GilbertQ]

Hi @curtissmith 

Apologies I thought you were using the gateway.

Then from your error it appears that something has changed in the source data which i will look at?

[curtissmith · Accepted solution]

Turns out the issue was due to a third party connector (EarthSoft) that changed their code without updating us. We got it figured out. Thank you for the help though!