Jean-Pierre Riehl on 17 Aug 2017 15:02:16
Ability to exclude a table from Data Refresh (scheduled, manual, API, etc.) in the Service.
In PBI Desktop, we have an option "Include in report refresh" we can disable for a table. But it won't affect PBI Service.
- Comments (78)
- Merged Idea (2)
RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service
As of April 2024, it seems this is still a problem. Tables marked unchecked for Include in Report Refresh are still refreshing through Power BI Services. When can there be a solution?
RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service
This is a absolutely needed solution to avoid a lot of manual work on data resets and re-publishing. Please address! Any update?
RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service
It would be a great feature for optimizing the load of big size historical data.
RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service
would be good feature!
RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service
This works for me. Anyone else want to check. Anyone seen a service update blog that included it?
RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service
Unchecking "Include in report refresh" is supposed to stop refreshing the query, yet if you reference that query in another query (something you'd do if you wanted to hold a local cache of the static data *not* to be refreshed), it disregards the setting and refreshes it again. Clearly a bug. Please fix.
Here's another mention of this from https://www.thebiccountant.com/2017/01/11/incremental-load-in-powerbi-using-dax-union/: "...unintuitive behaviour of queries which have been set to “Don’t include in Report Refresh”: As a standalone-query, they will behave as expected and not refresh. But once you reference them by a separate query or within an append-operation, they will refresh their results. So beware of this potential trap!..."
RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service
In Power BI Desktop, in the Power Query Editor you can configure the setting "Include in report refresh" for each query.
In Desktop this will then just contain the information from the fist time when this was accessed. And never try to reach for the source file to refresh it.
If this report ist uploaded to Power BI Service you would think that it acts in the same way.
But Power BI Service, when you start refreshing the query, it will first check if it has access to all the query source file in the report.
-> If it has not, you will get a error accordingly (even if "Include in report refresh" is disabled).
-> If it has, it will refresh all the query's where "Include in report refresh" is enabled.
In my opinion, Power BI should not check if it can reach the query source file if "Include in report refresh" is disabled.
This issue is long known and also many other Power BI users consider it as a Bug:
- https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Issues/quot-Include-in-report-refresh-quot-disabling-doesn-t-work-in/idi-p/331982
- https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Disabling-quot-Include-in-report-refresh-quot-not-working/m-p/432771
And there are many more posts about it in the forum. You will always get suggestion to work around this poor design but unfortunately until now I have not found any real will to change or improve the behavior from Microsoft side.
I created a Support Ticket and was told that this is unfortunately as designed. So we need this votes on this Idea to have this behavior changed.
To sum it up:
In my opinion Power BI Service should ignore query's with "Include in report refresh" disabled completely. Also not check for this query source file. So that this settings can be used intentionally to be able to refresh reports with some files not available for refresh.
RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service
Unbelievable that this functionality hasn't been put in despite people requesting it for three years! It shouldn't be too difficult to implement, and it fixes very unexpected and unwanted behavior when a dataset is included in the Power BI service.
RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service
This would be very useful! Often there is a big table containing historical data that doesn't change over time. Now the refresh is slow because of this tables that don't need a refresh at all.
RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service
This is very useful. When can we anticipate?