Data Refresh - What do end users see during the process?

[tmcdevitt]

We're doing nightly data refreshes on a number of our reports that we then serve up to users via embedding in another app.

We ran into a problem with the data source last night and the data sets need to be refreshed manually for each of the reports. Our data sets are quite large and refreshes can take up to 30 minutes.

My question - during a refresh, what do end users see? Will reports render with stale data (this is ok with us if they do) or do the reports break because the data's actively being refreshed?

We've never actually run a refresh manually like this so we don't fully understand the impact it might have on users.

Thanks.

- Terence

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@tmcdevitt They will see the cached dataset until the new data replaces it. If they are actively looking at the report, and the refresh occured and finished while they were still looking they would need to refresh their browser to see the new data.

[tmcdevitt · Accepted solution]

Thanks Seth.

So, I assume cached copies take into consideration the report level filters that are being used?

We ended up manually refreshing our data and noticed that reports we had hit prior to the refresh rendered and those that we hit during the refresh (as a different user, which meant different report filters) did not.

It seems that a better approach here would be for PBI to refresh into a temporary table and then swap that with the live table (or tables) once the refresh is complete. I understand there's overhead involved here but there'd certainly be less impact to the end user with this approach.