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Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service

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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)
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Raymond Boone on 08 Dec 2020 22:43:02

RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service

I actually spent some time testing this today with the November 2020 version of Power BI desktop and the Power BI service--publishing to a Premium Capacity workspace and the setting works. If I set the query to not load during report refresh, scheduled refreshes did NOT load new data. When I changed the setting in desktop and republished, the data loaded on scheduled refresh as expected.

I did have issues using Power BI Desktop RS May 2020--publishing to a Premium Capacity workspace produced inconsistent results--sometimes the setting worked, other times it did not. It also 100% did not work on the report server.

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Raymond Boone on 08 Dec 2020 18:03:25

RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service

Agree with everyone posting here. This "feature" doesn't make sense. I found the same behavior on the report server. If you uncheck the box to "Include in report refresh," that should still mean something once you've published the report in the Service or the Server.

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Michael Ressat on 03 Dec 2020 21:45:29

RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service

It happen so often, that You have beside database sources also local excel sheets as sources which contains static data. But if local PC is not online refresh on Power BI Services fail. I cannot understand that it is not possibe to exclude local data from beeing schedule refresh on Power BI Services. Please implement this feature as soon as possible. Thank You !

Michael Ressat

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Rahul Dhamnani on 04 Nov 2020 18:20:46

RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service

Include is report refresh is a very useful feature. Please fix this design problem for PowerBI Service. We have a table with 157mil records and it does not require update for long period of time. However, due its size, all small table refreshes in the same data model have to suffer. IT IS IMPORTANT to have selective Table Refresh Feature. I am surprised how design team has missed it!

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Todd Chittenden on 29 Sep 2020 13:21:45

RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service

I submitted this as a BUG through the standard Power BI channels based on the comment by someone at Microsoft who read this post and basically said that it's NOT an idea, but a BUG and should be submitted as such and tracked internally, etc.. After about three weeks the product team came back and called BY DESIGN. So that puts its focus back here on User Voice. I'm still doing battle with the Product Team to FIX it and will try to add additional comments to this thread as appropriate.

In the mean time, get your friends and relatives to sign up and VOTE!

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Daniel Shapiro on 19 Sep 2020 22:35:02

RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service

Please fix this!

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Helene Seyr on 09 Sep 2020 12:32:56

RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service

I agree with the comments before me, this is not a new feature, but rather a bug fix. Having the selection from PBI desktop not affect PBI service is counter-intuitive design.

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bla Power BI User on 09 Sep 2020 08:01:38

RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service

Fix this bug please. This is not a "feature". This should be standard behaviour when selecting "do not include in report refresh".

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Jonathan Thomson on 03 Aug 2020 09:00:47

RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service

This is needed. Like the OP I assumed that include in report refresh would be reflected in the service, but it isn't, so I cannot quickly fix a report that's temporarily broken and need to remove it so everything else works. This would have great benefits for several sets of archiving that I'm wanting to do, but cannot as it would require the tables to always be present

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Todd Chittenden on 10 Jul 2020 17:22:02

RE: Exclude a table from refresh in Power BI Service

Going on 3 years now that this has been like this and yet NO RESPONSE FROM MICROSOFT. Oh, they may say, "It's by design" to which we would all answer, "Well, it's POOR design and you need to re-think it!"

Let's get the word out to friends and co-workers and anybody you might know at Microsoft to raise awareness of this issue.

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