Fast Combine - what is it?

[SusieBentley]

I'm experienciing an issue with scheduled refersh in the Service and a number of forum posts suggest that enabling Fast Combine for my On-premises data gateway (personal mode) could solve the problem.

[FYI my issue relates to the error message "We cannot convert the value "[Record]" to type Record" with a SharePoint list and a number of .xlsx files as the data sources].

However... I can't find any documentation that actually explains what Fast Combine is, and I'm reluctant to action this without understanding why!

Can anyone explain to me what Fast Combine is and in what scenarios it needs to be enabled?

thanks!

[v-yuta-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi SusieBentley,

What is Fast Combine?

To learn more about privacy levels and Fast Combine, you can look at Privacy Levels. By default, the privacy level will be set to private which could result in the error mentioned above. This is because a setting of private will isolate the data source from other sources. An example of where this would be a problem would be a parameterized query getting inputs from another data source.

Turning Fast Combine on will ignore the private setting and allow the execution to occur.

Regards,

Jimmy Tao

[SusieBentley]

That's really helpful, thanks Jimmy. Just what I was after.

I'm still experiencing my refresh issue but at least I understand if/where Fast Combine comes into this now! 

Thanks for your quick reply

Susie