Do Dataflow entities refresh in Series or in Parallel?

[mmace1]

Hi, 

If you have > 1 entity within a Dataflow, when the dataflow refreshes:

• do the entities refresh at the same time (i.e. in parallel)
• or one at a time (i.e. in a series?). 

And can the behavior, whatever it is, be modified? 

I see an older question ended with "Not known, check with the Azure Data Lake folks" as an answer but that was almost 2 yeras ago, so seems worth checking again. 

[v-henryk-mstf]

Hi @mmace1 ,

Did you refer to the following link: Solved: Re: Data Flow refresh - parallel or separately - Microsoft Power BI Community

Sorry, there is no further improvement at the moment, but you can post your idea here. Hope to help you solve the problem as soon as possible.

Best Regards,
Henry

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[brent_reffner]

The dataflow refresh history allows you to see the execution times by table including start and end time. You can clearly see that tables are executed sequentially. I have not found any option which allows you to execute in parallel as you can with a dataset. Hopefully, this is something the Microsoft Power BI team will address. They are being "tight-lipped" which means they probably know about it but do not now how to address it.

Requested on	Dataflow name	Dataflow refresh status	Table name	Refresh status	Start time	End time	Duration
10/13/2023 3:42	Common Dataflow	Completed	Calendar	Completed	10/13/2023 3:42:02	10/13/2023 3:42:33	00:31.1
10/13/2023 3:42	Common Dataflow	Completed	Customer	Completed	10/13/2023 3:42:33	10/13/2023 3:43:04	00:30.5
10/13/2023 3:43	Common Dataflow	Completed	Item	Completed	10/13/2023 3:43:04	10/13/2023 3:43:35	00:30.6

I have added this as a topic of consideration. You can vote for this enhancement here.

[collinq]

Hey @mmace1 ,

That is an interesting question.  I don't think it is outlined yet exactly how that works.  However, I found this Chris Webb article where he talks about the SQL Server Profiler and some hints at how this might work.  It may be that you could ask him directly if he knows for the Dataflow?

Chris Webb's BI Blog: Power BI, Caching, Parallelism And Power Query Refresh Performance Chris Webb'...