Cancelling Power BI Dataset Refreshes With The Enhanced Refresh API

The most exciting (at least for me) feature in the new Enhanced Refresh API (blog announcement | docs) is the ability to cancel a dataset refresh that’s currently in progress. Up until now, as this blog post by my colleague Michael Kovalsky shows, this has been quite difficult to do: not only do you need to use the XMLA Endpoint but you also need to take into account that in many cases the Power BI Service will automatically restart the refresh even after you’ve cancelled it. Now, though, if (and only if) you start the refresh using the Enhanced Refresh API you can also cancel it via the Enhanced Refresh API too. This is important because I’ve seen a few cases where rogue refreshes have consumed a lot of CPU on a Premium capacity and caused throttling, even after all CPU smoothing has taken place, and Power BI admins have struggled to cancel the refreshes.

This and all the other great functionality the new API includes (the ability to refresh individual tables or partitions! control over parallelism!) means that it can handle many of the advanced scenarios that, in the past, you’d have had to write some complex TMSL commands for; in my opinion anyone working on an enterprise-level dataset in Power BI Premium should be using it for their refreshes.

But Chris, I hear you say, I’m a data person and find working with APIs confusing and difficult! Yeah, me too – which is why, when I saw this tweet by Stephen Maguire about .NET interactive notebook for Visual Studio Code he’s built for the Enhanced Refresh API, I was interested:

https://github.com/samaguire/PowerBINotebooks

It’s a really great set of examples for learning how to use the Enhanced Refresh API through PowerShell and the notebook format makes it a lot more user-friendly than just another bunch of scripts. I highly recommend that you check it out.