Automatic PowerBI report refresh

[Anonymous]

Hello,

we've faced a major issue with Power BI reports.

Our client has some reports online that are connected with a live connection to their on-premise SSAS cube (currently Multi-Dimensional, not Tabular) on SQL Server 2016.

We refresh the cube twice a day (it's finished at approximately 18:45 CET an 09:45 CET). When the end-user logins to PBI online at 9:50 CET and opens a report, we would expect that he would see the latest data (refreshed at 09:45 CET), but this isn't the case.

It is not acceptable for them to wait another 15 minutes for the data to refresh (and I'm not even sure that this works). This is a major deal-braker for lots of our other customers, and we won't be able to use Power BI for them in the future, if we can't solve this issue.

How can we force Power BI to refresh reports at some point (with a web-service call after ETL process or something like that), or that the report automatically (without pressing the Refresh button) gets refreshed when the user opens the report?

Thank you in advance.

[otravers]

This old thread still ranks high in search engine, so I thought I'd update it with the relevant documentation on automatic page refresh for Direct Query (fully supported) and Live Connection (partially supported: fixed intervals work, but change detection doesn't):

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/desktop-automatic-page-refresh

[v-juanli-msft]

Hi @Anonymous

According to this article, If your dataset is configured for a live or DirectQuery connection, datasets are refreshed approximately each hour or when interaction with the data occurs. You can manually adjust the refresh frequency in the Scheduled cache refresh option in the Power BI service.

when interaction with the data occurs means something like create a visual and add data into or filter data, not refer to open a report.

If you want to created a real-time dashboard, you can take a look at below articles:

Real-time streaming in Power BI (Preview)

Reference:

Data refresh in Power BI

Best Regards

Maggie

[Anonymous]

Hi @v-juanli-msft,

thanks for your answer.

However, it doesn't exactly solve my problem. 

Refresh frequency is now set to 15 minutes. If you imagine a case when the cube gets processed in the range of 9:10 AM to 9:25AM. In the best case, users can see the results (when they open the report) instantly. In the worst case, they have to wait the whole 15 minutes to get fresh data shown to them. 

I can't achieve instant fresh data shown on the report in Power BI, can I? That's a major setback. 

Is it possible to disable caching for one report?

Best regards, Boris

[v-juanli-msft]

Hi @Anonymous

Could you find the option "Refresh Now" when right-click on the dataset, it will refresh the dataset right now.

Additionally, i find an article providing a solution of refreshing less than every 15 minutes power bi directquery automatically.

https://www.credera.com/blog/technology-solutions/power-bi-directquery-automatically-refresh-less-than-every-15-minutes/

Best Regards

Maggie

[Anonymous]

Dear Maggie,

it seems to me that you didn't read the whole post where I was describing my problem.

Our reports are connected via "live connection", not "direct query".

And the whole issue is that the client(s) refuse(s) to use the "refresh button", as they expect the reports to be "fresh" when they open the report. The only issue here is the "user experience".

Best regards,

Boris

[Anonymous]

Dear Maggie,

it seems to me that you didn't read the whole post where I was describing my problem.

Our reports are connected via "live connection", not "direct query".

And the whole issue is that the client(s) refuse(s) to use the "refresh button", as they expect the reports to be "fresh" when they open themt. The only issue here is user experience.

Best regards,

Boris