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Stop Executing Queries Multiple Times

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on 01 Feb 2019 23:43:45

I create a query in Power BI Desktop against a data source. Power BI Desktop insists on executing it multiple (usually three) times. This makes Desktop slow and for back-end data sources exerts additional load that can also incur additional costs.

Note: I am not talking about the scenario where a query is referred to multiple times in M, rather just a simple query loaded into one table in the data model. I assume the engine is checking data types, etc - but the current approach is very slow/painful. Optimisation is needed!

Comments (18)
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Didier Terrien on 05 Jul 2020 23:52:10

RE: Stop Executing Queries Multiple Times

No information from Power BI team?
At least please let us know why it happens

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amh on 05 Jul 2020 23:50:06

RE: Stop Executing Queries Multiple Times

Not sure if I have the exact same problem as the OP but working on the data model in complex cases is very painful and it needs to be easier to jump between transformations to debug issues without issuing a fresh recall of data

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Power BI User on 05 Jul 2020 23:48:00

RE: Stop Executing Queries Multiple Times

Absolutely ridiculous that this happens. I try to refresh a dashboard, the query for 2 years takes 30 minutes. Three executions of the query (2 of which are unnecessary) take 1 hour 30. Not sure why this is.

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Power BI Ideas Admin on 05 Jul 2020 23:45:08

RE: Stop Executing Queries Multiple Times

Hi Microsoft team !



What about this really important issue ?

It is not acceptable from customers not to have any answer or solution for this old issue, which is really problematic for us as several users run queries from PowerBi Desktop to our datasources (like Hive) and this become now a real performance issue for our platform.

We really need a solution from your team. Quickly.

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Chris Amore on 05 Jul 2020 23:44:32

RE: Stop Executing Queries Multiple Times

How do you monitor this type of activity? With the Prem-logs? We are struggling with refresh performance, timeouts and failure and I would like to see if this is part of our issue. This seems like a good way to make Microsoft customers pay for more capacity.

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Mike L on 05 Jul 2020 23:41:50

RE: Stop Executing Queries Multiple Times

If it does not get fixed, it may be the death of the product here. I will need to use something else.

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Bob Hornung on 05 Jul 2020 23:40:37

RE: Stop Executing Queries Multiple Times

We have been fighting the same issue & agree it's a bigger problem with large datasets. We commonly see duplicate requests issued to the source (via on prem gateway) by an otherwise simple Power BI Online refresh.

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Power BI User on 05 Jul 2020 23:40:08

RE: Stop Executing Queries Multiple Times

Very much needed for big data. Having a query that hits billions of records run multiple times can add hours in processing time. We currently have to write the data to a temp table so we can bring it into Power BI, but only one dashboard is using that particular dataset, so...