Dashboard cache refresh

Dashboard tiles based on import mode datasets are refreshed when the dataset itself is refreshed in the Power BI service. For dashboard tiles based on DirectQuery or Live connection datasets, however, the Power BI service maintains a scheduled cache refresh process for updating dashboard tiles. The purpose of this cache is to ensure dashboards are loaded extremely quickly since, as described in Chapter 13, Designing Power BI Dashboards and Architectures, many users, such as executives, exclusively rely on dashboards.

By default, the dashboard tile cache is refreshed once every hour. As shown in the following image, owners of these datasets can configure this refresh process to occur as frequently as every 15 minutes or as infrequently as once per week:

Scheduled cache refresh

In the preceding example, a Power BI dataset (AdWorksEnterpriseDQ) containing a DirectQuery connection to an on-premises SQL Server database has been published to an app workspace in Power BI. The...