February 2014 – The White Pages

Office 365 (without Power BI) has supported data refresh for Excel and PowerPivot for some time, and it works well provided that the data source is both in the cloud, and is one of the supported data sources. To refresh a workbook, simply open the workbook in the Excel Web App, open the data menu and select “Refresh All Connections”.

Up until just recently, this was how it worked with Power BI workbooks as well, with the additional ability of being able to refresh on premises data through the Data Management Gateway. However, with the latest refresh of the Power BI application, and its support of scheduled refresh, this has changed. Now, if you follow this procedure and attempt to manually refresh a Power BI enabled workbook from an on premises data source, you will receive an error.

The error is pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t try to explain it. Scheduled data refresh hasn’t just been added, it has replaced the old refresh method. That’s all well and good, but what about those use cases where we want to manually refresh data? The good news is that it hasn’t been lost, it’s just been moved. It is, however, well hidden.

To refresh the workbook on demand, you must first open the Power BI application, locate your workbook, and click on its ellipsis to open its context menu.

Next, you need to select “Schedule Data Refresh”. Now I know that we don’t want to schedule the refresh, but to update it on demand, so you’ll just need to trust me here. Selecting “Schedule Data Refresh” will open the scheduling interface into either the history tab (if the workbook has already been scheduled) or the settings tab (if it has not). In any event, you’ll need to be in the settings tab.

If the workbook has not already been enabled for scheduled refresh, it will need to be. Once it has, the “save and refresh report” button will be available. If it has already been saved, the button will read “refresh report now”. In either case, clicking on it will start the refresh process immediately.

On-demand refresh is still available, but I have to say that it’s well hidden. The fact that it has moved into the Power BI application means that a Power BI license will be required to refresh it on demand, which seems quite reasonable to me. However, some better visual cues would be a big help. For example, why not add “refresh now” to the context menu in the Power BI application?

In addition, given that the refresh is being initiated manually, some visual cues around the status of the refresh (started, in progress, completed) would help considerably. As it stands, the only status information is available after the refresh completes, on the history tab of “Schedule Data Refresh”.

There has also been another subtle change around how workbooks are displayed in Power BI. When a workbook is opened from the source Office 365 library, the standard Excel Web App interface is displayed, with options for opening in Excel, editing, etc. displayed.

However, if you first navigate to the Power BI application, and open the workbook by clicking on the thumbnail, it will open in the browser but without the Web App chrome.

~~I’m not sure what the reasoning is for this different behaviour, but it’s a change, and something that you should be aware of.~~ UPDATE 14/2/14 – It has been explained to me that the reason for this different behaviour is an effort to reduce screen clutter for those using the Power BI application. It’s a consumption mostly application, so this change makes sense in that context. It’s also possible to add the Excel Web app chrome back in by using a new “action bar” (my name). If you look to the bottom of the worksheet window, you’ll see it, and its three icons.

The three icons, from left, allow you to submit feedback to Microsoft, to get embed codes for the report (a new feature!) and finally, to restore the standard Web App chrome (for editing etc.)

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It’s finally here.

Quietly, sometime over the past few days, Microsoft updated the Power BI application in Office 365 along with the Data Management Gateway (get it here). Chief among the changes is the ability to schedule data refresh, which to my thinking, is the single most important feature for deploying Business Intelligence solution in the cloud.

Until now, it has been possible to refresh Excel worksheets with embedded data models on demand, In fact, if your data source was also in the cloud (and was one of the supported data sources), you don’t need Power BI to do it, it’s supported natively in Office 365. If your data source is on-premises (and either Oracle or SQL Server), you can do it through the Data Management Gateway. What has been missing is the ability to have the data model refreshed in the absence of interaction. No longer.

This capability can of course be found in PowerPivot for SharePoint on premises. It is configured on a per workbook basis in the PowerPivot Gallery, which is a PowerPivot focused view of a document library that contains workbooks. In works in much the same manner with Power BI, with the Power BI application taking the place of the Power Pivot gallery.

Configuring Scheduled Refresh

To turn on automatic refresh for a workbook, you need to access the workbook’s BI context menu. To do this, first, open the Power BI application, then locate the workbook that you wish to have refreshed automatically. Click on the ellipsis to access the menu.

A number of items have been added to the menu, and to the preview graphic itself. To the left of the ellipsis is information on when the model was last updated, and the context menu adds the ability to edit in Excel and to add to Q&A as well. However, the feature that we’re interested in is the scheduled data refresh, and selecting that option takes us to the scheduled refresh screen.

If refresh has not already been configured, it opens into the settings tab, otherwise, the history tab will be opened.

To turn on refresh, simply select the “on” slider. If your model has multiple data sources you can choose them to be included or not. As far as I have seen, you can only have one schedule per workbook, so if a data source isn’t included, it simply won’t be updated.

Next, select your refresh schedule, which will be either daily or weekly. By default, your schedule will have a shelf life of 90 days, and will turn off after that time. You can adjust this period by changing the value of the “Ends By” field. You can then select a time (or a day and time if appropriate) for the refresh to occur. Finally, any errors will be sent to the email address that you specify in the notification field.

That’s really all there is to it. Selecting “save settings” will save the schedule, and “save and refresh report” will save the schedule, and attempt to run an immediate refresh.

If the data source is cloud based, it will be queried directly by Power BI, and if it is on premises, it will contact the appropriate Data Management Gateway process and refresh through it. I would love for there to be a little more status information for refreshes in the administration portal, but for now, the refresh will either succeed or fail. However, If the data source is on premises, you can open the Resource Monitor on the gateway machine, and monitor the “diawp.exe” process.

Once the refresh kicks in you’ll notice it using a lot of send bandwidth.

Selecting the “history” tab will of course show the refresh history, and what the refresh schedule for the workbook is. At a glance you can see whether or not refreshes succeeded or failed, how long they took, and how they were initiated.

~~I should note here that I have been working with the Power BI preview for several months now, and in order to get scheduled refresh to work with on premises data, I did need to install the latest~~ ~~Data Management Gateway. I’m not sure if this was because scheduled refresh required it, or just because it had expired (it had), but I would recommend installing it in any case.~~ Update 10/02/14 – I have been informed that scheduled refresh does not require the latest data management gateway, but I would recommend getting it all the same – it’s the release version.

One interesting side note. After installing the latest DMG, accessing its configuration shows its version to be 1.0, where previous versions were all point releases (the latest being 0.11). I can’t help but assume that the General Availability of Power BI isn’t far away. UPDATE 10/02/14 – In fact, Power BI went GA today, and this is in fact the GA version of the Data Management Gateway.

Limitations

There are a number of behaviours and limitations that you should be aware of when using scheduled refresh in Power BI. The below items are by no means exhaustive, but simply things that I have either run into, or been made aware of.

Too much data

As I have outlined previously, the maximum size for an embedded workbook model in Power BI is 250 MB. If a user attempts to enable a larger model, they will receive an error message. However, scheduled refresh now allows for the possibility that the model could start small, and then grow to exceed this limit through refresh. What then happens when the limit is exceeded?

When the model is opened for refresh, its size is checked. If it’s OK, the refresh proceeds, and the model is updated. If the model now exceeds the limits, the next refresh will fail, as will any attempts to work with the file through a browser, until the size of the model is reduced.

Collisions

Refreshes can take a fair amount of time. During this period, the file is not checked out exclusively to the refresh process, and if it is edited by a user in that time an edit collision could occur. If this situation arises, scheduled refresh will simply discard its updates and fail.

Frequency

As mentioned above, the two options for schedule frequency are daily and weekly. I was really hoping to see hourly. Monthly and annually would be great too. As it stands, if your data needs to be more current than daily, then Power BI still won’t work for you (without heavy customization). Of course, the reality is that daily is frequent enough for most situations, and this at least puts data refresh on par with its counterpart in PowerPivot for SharePoint.

If someone from the product team is reading this, hourly updates would be my #2 feature ask, for both Power BI and Power Pivot for SharePoint. (for the #1 ask, read on).

Limited Data Sources

At the moment, the refreshable data sources are those that are currently supported by Office 365 in the cloud (Azure SQL, SQL on Azure VMs, and OData feeds with simple or no authentication), and those supported by the Data Management Gateway (SQL Server 205 +, Oracle 10g +). A full list can be found in the official documentation here.

This is a great starting list, but it is limited. There are quite a number of other data sources that would be great to see on this list, multidimensional sources being right up there. However to my thinking, the most glaring omission on this list is Power Query.

The above data sources are supported if the data was imported into the model through Power Pivot’s import feature (or the native features in Excel 2013). However, if a user takes advantage of the many excellent features available in Power Query, their model will not be automatically refreshable. I have already seen in the preview forums that this difference confuses users, and given that Power Query is a highly touted integral component of Power BI, it needs to become a first class citizen, and soon. That’s my #1 ask – again, both for Power BI and Power Pivot for SharePoint.

However, for the moment, what you need to know is that if your model is built with Power Query, it can’t be refreshed automatically.

Limitations aside, it appears to me that Power BI is an absolutely compelling value proposition, and the inclusion of scheduled refresh completes the picture. I can’t wait for it to be released into the wild. Let the games begin!

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