Richard Power BI User on 30 Nov 2019 14:48:27
The dataflows product is potentially very useful - I especially like the idea of being able to append historical data to incrementally refreshed data.
However, one major drawback is the fact that in order to use a dataflow in a dataset, you have to download it to the desktop, and then upload it back to the service once you've completed your data model.
It would be great if you only had to use the preview version of the dataflow in desktop, or even better, if you could do all modelling, DAX etc. completely within the service.
If there are workarounds for this I'd love to hear them.
- Comments (31)
RE: Dataflow-based Datasets in service
This is a very frustrating limitation of Power BI. Please enhance the server version of Power BI so users can create reports that periodically refresh from Data Flows. As the author of this ticket implied, it is very frustrating to have to: use the Desktop version of Power BI to "download" Data Flow data into a DataSet; refresh the DataSet and/or Report; and then republish that report back to the server in order to get reports that are already on the server to "refresh".
In fact, this is so inconvenient that I would possibly suggest to my superiors that we are better off (in some cases) using alternate products when periodic refreshing of data is desired. It seems to me that if periodic refreshing of data is needed on a server, that SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) or a third party charting solution might be more useful than Power BI (in it's current state).
I know there are Streaming DataSets to try to overcome this, but I'm concerned that Streaming DataSets "may" have difficulty persisting data in some cases. I am also aware that you can use MS Flow (now called Power Automate) to create "actions" that generate or push to server side datasets on the fly, but that's a bit of a pain in my opinion.