Best practice to deal with model updates

[jth42]

I'm a developer with a couple of database apps. I want to provide the CEO access to the databases through Power BI, ideally online.

Getting it started is easy enough, but any time there's a schema change in the databases, I need to update Power BI's idea of the model too.

As far as I can see, this can't be automated, so I have to re-run the wizard in the Desktop application every time that happens.

That also means that if I only want to select certain tables, I will have to manually re-specify those tables in every update.

Did I overlook something?

[Greg_Deckler]

I'm not sure of the wizard that you are talking about. Not sure there is a good answer anyway however. Database schema changes are difficult to deal with in any circumstance. This is one reason people build things like datamarts and such to insulate reporting from the source databases. So that would be a solution or stop with all the database schema updates.

[jth42]

> Database schema changes are difficult to deal with in any circumstance

It would be very easy if PowerBI would just allow me define and update the model in the form of some json text file.

Then I could have that generated from my schema.

[v-yulgu-msft]

Hi @jth42,

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 It would be very easy if PowerBI would just allow me define and update the model in the form of some json text file.

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Unfortunately, Power BI doesn't support this feature.

Regards,

Yuliana Gu