Forum Discussion

SarahWeeden's avatar
SarahWeeden
Qrew Trainee
3 years ago

Re: Read Charges from PowerBI Connections

Hi Don,
I think it depends on the question (if you want to share I can try to help) and if they are on the new subscription model which is based on reads. With the new subscription model, QB consolidated billable reads from an account perspective (a read being anything from a user looking at report, to a pipeline step). This simplifies billing but requires a bit more data management for analysis and tracking trends or anomalies, especially with the move from automations to pipelines. Proactively tracking all of the reads per app, per pipeline, per week, and watching for anomalies is important but also informative for renewals in case you know you are going to need to increase your subscription allotments. 

As far as PowerBI specifically, we have had to move data out of QB into a separate database for PowerBI users, because most user activity in power query is charged as a read, and it was eating a huge portion of our allotments. 

Hope that helps. 
-Sarah

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Sarah Weeden
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9 Replies

  • DonLarson's avatar
    DonLarson
    Qrew Elite
    3 years ago
    Sarah,

    I understand now.  New and old plans with the new ones being usage based.

    The customer has a call with Boston today that I will be sitting in on.  I will urge them to stay on the old model.

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    Don Larson
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    • DonLarson's avatar
      DonLarson
      Qrew Elite
      3 years ago
      Sarah,

      That was quite a meeting.   This was the first time I heard the details on the "new" plans.  There is a 20% price increase which is not surprising.  The kicker was that API calls per user was going down from 1000 per day to 75.   I nearly fell out of my chair.



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      Don Larson
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  • SrinathM_R's avatar
    SrinathM_R
    Qrew Member
    3 years ago

    Hi Sarah, 

    Even we are using Power BI and the reads usage seem to be quite high even if we had daily refresh similar to your scenario. Can you please tell me what workaround did you do to reduce the reads? 



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    Srinath M.R
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    • AdamKrzyzanek's avatar
      AdamKrzyzanek
      Qrew Captain
      3 years ago

      Unfortunately, I have similar problem but reading Quickbase by DOMO.
      1) Consume lots of reads

      2) When DOMO reads my app performance drops dramatically, especially when we read tables with formula Queries.



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      Adam Krzyzanek
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      • SarahWeeden's avatar
        SarahWeeden
        Qrew Trainee
        3 years ago

        We are moving all of our PBI users out of Quickbase because of this. Instead, we use Qunect to export data changes daily to Snowflake and the PBI users now connect to Snowflake. Qunect can export data in batches of 2000 records at a time that counts as one read. It was not tenable to continue to allow users to connect directly to QB due to the way reads are being charged. 



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        Sarah Weeden
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