Report Server Scheduled refresh issues

[Phil_pac]

Working with Power BI report server september 2022. We have a bunch of reports with scheduled refresh. I would like to understand why some of the refresh plans stays stuck on status Refreshing in progress?

Other reports do refresh but for exemple if they are scheduled for 7:00 am , the status is ends up completed but last run is many hours after the time scheduled.

I have done lot of research many point out to the way the reports are built , but my issue with this is when you test in the Power BI Desktop app you do a manual refresh , this works fine and updates within a minute. I would expect same result on the server...

Please help

[Phil_pac · Accepted solution]

Found out that the table dbo.Event in the Power Bi database had over 60 000 rows. Truncated the table and that fixed the issue.

One of the main thing is I need to educated Report creaters to not make refresh schedule of 2min - 5 min or even 30 min... this is not best practice and can cause this types of issues.

But for now even with some reports setup like that we have been running fine for a few days now and the event table has not filled up yet. 

[v-alipat]

Hi! 

Quick question - is your Report Server machine in the same timezone as client machine? (machine that you access the Report Server Portal from) 

[v-binbinyu-msft]

Hi @Phil_pac ,

Please try to click referesh button for report in Power BI Report Server Portal, it works like refresh in Power BI Desktop. When you open the report in the Portal, you could see the button "Refresh", please click it.

Best regards,
Community Support Team_ Binbin Yu
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Phil_pac]

No this is not it. That only refreshes the page. The purpose of the scheduled refresh is that the data will refresh from what ever the source is. 

[rachelgomez1234]

The following are the more common issues you will hit when trying to schedule refresh for a report.

Driver related problems
Connecting to different data sources may require 3rd party drivers that need to be installed in order to connect successfully. Not only would you need to install them on the machine you are using Power BI Desktop on, but you will also need to make sure the driver is installed on the report server.

The driver may also come in both 32bit and 64bit. Make sure to install the 64bit driver as Power BI Report Server is 64bit.

Please refer to the manufacturer for details on how to install and configure 3rd party drivers.

Memory pressure
Memory pressure can occur when reports require more memory to process and render. Schedule refresh on reports may demand a significant amount of memory on the machine. Especially for larger reports. Memory pressure can result in report failures as well as a potential crash of the report server itself.

If you are encountering memory pressure consistently, it may be worth looking at a scaled out deployment of the report server in order to spread the load of resources. You can also define that a given report server is used for data refresh with the IsDataModelRefreshService setting within rsreportserver.config. With this setting, you could define one or more servers to be the front end server to handle on demand reports, and have another set of servers to only be used for scheduled refresh.

For information on how to monitor an Analysis Services instance, see Monitor an Analysis Services Instance.

For information about memory settings within Analysis Services, see Memory Properties.

Kerberos configuration
Connecting to a data source with windows credentials may require configuring Kerberos constrained delegation to make a successful connection. For more information about how to configure Kerberos constrained delegation, see Configure Kerberos to use Power BI reports.

Regards,

Rachel Gomez

[Mostafa-Hussien]

@rachelgomez1234 

Hi Rachel

I deployed some pbix reports on PBIRS. I creates scheduled refresh. My problem is that they somtimes fail and sometimes succeed. I mainly have 3 errors

1- Unable to combine data error. 

Exact error syntax

ErrorCode 1055784932 Unable to combine data: xxx references other queries or steps, so it may not directly access a data source. Please rebuild this data combination

2- Deadlock victim

Exact syntax

ErrorCode 0 Transaction Process ID 71 was deadlocked on lock resources with another process and has been chosen as the deadlock victim. Rerun the transaction

3- Report Server Database Unavailable

Exact syntax (there are 2 actually)

3-1- ErrorCode 1056505856 COM error: Microsoft.BIServer.HostingEnvironment, ReportServerDatabaseUnavailableException
3-2- ErrorCode 1056505856 COM error: Microsoft.PowerBI.ReportServer.ASEngineManagedRoot, ReportServerDatabaseUnavailableException

I believe these are somehow not issues about the pbix because once I go into

Manage => Scheduled Refresh => Refresh Now

they successfully refresh, some from the first time, some from the second, third or fourth time

So why does that happen ?

Then I read your post while searching for reasons and solution and would like to ask you about the solution you are proposing regarding making a server for refreshing and another for data consumers. Can you elaborate on that ?