What Is Data Refresh In Power BI And How To Set Up Schedule Refresh In Power BI Service

Introduction

Reports need to show the latest and real-time data,  only then will the user will get the correct business insight. Power BI provides the auto-refresh and manual refresh options which you can set up according to your need of the organization. In this article, we will learn the data refresh options available in Power BI. Additionally, we will explore ways to refresh data manually as well as how to enable and set up scheduled refresh in Power BI.

Types of Refreshes

The article will describe two types of refreshes: Manual Refresh and Scheduled Automatic Refresh.

Manual Refresh

In power BI, we can refresh data manually. Owner or Admin users need to log into Power BI Service and refresh data manually whenever they need to view the latest data in the report

Refresh Manually from Opened Report

If you are an admin user, you can refresh the visuals from the opened report as illustrated below.

Refresh from Dataset

You can refresh the data by refreshing the dataset as shown in the below image.

Scheduled Automatic Refresh

On the other hand, we can schedule a refresh according to our needs. We can enable the schedule refresh and setup date time as per our requirement.

You can below steps to configure schedule refresh.

Step 1 - Dataset Setting

Right-click on Dataset and go to Dataset Setting as illustrated below.

Step 2 - Turn on Schedule Refresh

If your dataset Schedule refresh is off you need to turn it on first.

Step 3 - Setup Refresh Time

Then you can set up the time for schedule refresh as depicted below.

Setup Refresh frequency as Daily, a weekly based on your need, chose your time zone, and select Time of refresh.

Additionally, you can set up for Send refresh failure notification to Database owner or other users too. If you want this feature to enable then select the checkbox as illustrated below.

Eventually, click on Apply to complete the schedule refresh setup.

We can implement multiple no of refresh schedule in a day based on our need and depending upon how often data get updated and how often users need to view the reports with the latest data.

For example, we can schedule auto-refresh early in the morning, mid-day, evening or night, and so on.

Conclusion

Hence, this article has described the data refresh options available in Power BI Service and how to schedule auto-refresh. In this article, we learned about auto-refresh and manual refresh options and how to set up or refresh data from the Power BI service.