Scheduled refresh

In the Ultra Transcenders books

PL-300

Each book explains Scheduled refresh in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• Semantic model

  Sometimes called an OLAP model, this Power BI and Fabric layer defines the measures, hierarchies, tables and relationships that reports and dashboards query; star schema design is the usual pattern.

• SCHEDULE clause

  Sets a timed refresh for a streaming table or materialized view. SCHEDULE EVERY takes an interval in hours, days or weeks, and SCHEDULE CRON takes a Quartz cron expression when exact or more frequent than hourly timing is needed.

• Agents (classic) API

  First-generation Foundry Agent Service API, based on threads, messages and runs. It is deprecated, replaced by conversations and responses, and retires on 31 March 2027.

• Shared capacity

  Hosts all My workspaces, Pro workspaces and Premium Per User workspaces in a tenant, and receives newly created ones unless reassigned. No compute is dedicated; Pro content there is capped at 1 GB per model and eight refreshes daily.

• PPU

  Premium Per User. Licensed person by person, it adds most Premium capacity features on top of everything Pro offers. Items in a PPU workspace are shareable only with other PPU licence holders, and no Fabric capacity comes with it.

• Premium

  Hosting plan for Azure Functions that keeps instances pre-warmed to avoid cold starts and supports VNet integration. Executions time out after 30 minutes by default, which host.json can extend.

• Fabric capacity

  The compute behind Microsoft Fabric, sized in capacity units (CUs). Microsoft recommends F SKUs, purchased via Azure with per-second billing.

Related terms

• ACE

  Power Query relies on this OLE DB provider to open Access files and older .xls or .xlsb Excel workbooks. Cloud services cannot have it installed, so scheduled refresh of such files goes through a gateway on a machine where ACE is present.

• Take over

  Only an owner can set up scheduled refresh, data source credentials and automatic aggregations for a semantic model. This action, in the model's settings in the service, transfers ownership to whoever selects it.