I have seen some questions in the Power BI / Fabric Community forum asking why datasets with a scheduled refresh do not start based on the user’s selection.
In this blog post I am going to show you how you can schedule a Power BI dataset to start at the exact time you want it to be refreshed.
Please NOTE: If you have a Power BI Pro license you can only refresh to a maximum of 8 times per day (Those could be 8 refreshes in a single hour, but once the 8 refreshes are used you must wait until the next day to refresh again).
In my working example I want to refresh my dataset at 7:37AM every day (This is because I sit down at my desk after making a coffee )
To do this I log into Power Automate.
I then go to my flows, click on the new Flow Drop down and select “Scheduled Flow”.
I then gave my flow a name and put in a time when I wanted the flow to run (Right now it is not the exact time I want, but I will fix this in subsequent steps).
I then also set it to repeat every 1 day so it will run once a day.
I then clicked on Create.
Once the flow loaded, I expanded the “Recurrence”, and then I also clicked on the “Show advanced options”.
I selected my time zone so that it would run at the time I expected it to.
For “At these hours” I clicked on 7 for it to start at the hour or 10.
Next, for “At these minutes” I put in 37 so that it will start at 7:37AM
As shown below I can see in the Preview when it will run.
Please note, I removed the values from the “Start time” column as shown below.
Below is what the new designer looks like, if you click on Recurrence, the step details show on the left-hand side as shown below.
In the next step I searched for “Refresh Power BI” and selected the “Refresh a dataset”
I then selected my workspace and dataset.
Below is what the new designer looks like, if you click on “Refresh a dataset”, the step details show on the left-hand side as shown below.
On the top right-hand side, I clicked on Save to save my flow.
If I wanted to, I could click on Test to test the flow, or I could leave it as is and let it run on the schedule.
I decided to let the flow run as scheduled to see if my dataset would start processing at 7:37AM
As you can see it ran on the schedule.
I also had a look in the Power BI Service, and it started refreshing at 10:26 AM
As I have shown in this blog post there is the capability to be able to schedule a Power BI dataset at the time you require.
I highly recommend you look at Power Automate as there are a lot of automation that can be achieved.
Thanks for reading and any questions or comments are most welcome!
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