Power BI Scheduled Refresh Every 15 Minutes

[Jay_AVA]

Hi everyone,

I built an ETL to export data from the database to company's share folder. So that my team can go check live data.

Then I build my power bi dashboard based on those live Excel files. 

After I published the dashboard to the workspace, I noticed I can only schedule refresh every 30 mins. Even with PPU license, I can refresh 48 times a day but the interval is still 30 mins, which totally doesn't make sense to me. All I want is more frequent updates not more times. 

For some reason I cannot directly connect my dashboard to the database. 

I tried Power Automate, it's asking me to connect to onedrive. My Excel file version is 97-2003, and I cannot open my onedrive auto save. 

Is there any other way that I can refresh my dashboard every 15 mins?

Any thoughts would be appreciated!!

Thanks!!

[otravers · Accepted solution]

The 30-minute intervals are only a limitation in the service UI, you can indeed have more flexibility through programmatic means.

I'm not sure why you're trying to connect your Power Automate flow to your Excel file in OneDrive if all you want to do is trigger Power BI dataset refreshes at specific times.

You can also can the Power BI REST API via other means such as PowerShell or Azure Functions, but it's very easy in Power Automate so that's how I usually do it.

[Jay_AVA]

Hi @otravers ,

Thank you so much for your advice!!! I setup a button trigger and scheduled an auto refresh. 

And here I just came up with another question: what kind of license that users will need to use the button trigger? Do they need both PPU and Power Automate License? 

Thanks.

[otravers]

I don't think they'll need a PPU account just to trigger the refresh from Power Automate, provided the flow has already been set up with the connection to Power BI with an account that does have a PPU license. I'm not 100% sure though so please report here if you find otherwise!

[Jay_AVA]

Hi @otravers ,

With the schedule flow, I can make it refresh every minute. I also see "Second" option.

For the button trigger, each user will need a Power Automate license to use that function. 

Then here's something that I cannot understand. If I can schedule to refresh every second, I don't need that button trigger. Thus I only need to buy 1 license for developer. (correct me if I'm wrong)

Maybe Power Automate has some other powerful functiona that I don't use.

[otravers]

Bear in mind that a refresh needs to be finished before you can start refreshing the same entity again, so your once-a-second scenario is not possible. If you need near real-time data then Direct Query or even streaming datasets would be a better fit than Import mode.