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SarahWeeden's avatar
SarahWeeden
Qrew Trainee
3 years ago

Read Charges from PowerBI Connections

Per QB, in October QB changed the way that APIReads driven by PBI connections were being charged to accounts. We have been trying to get answers on what exactly changed and what kind of activity is driving the charges, because they don't directly align with obvious user activity. Users are connecting to PBI via reports and the dashboards have auto-refreshes of once a day (generally). However we are seeing APIReads in excess of 100+ a day per user. A Solution Architect did some tests with PBI and she said that the following resulted in multiple reads per action: Refresh preview (4 reads) and saving (2 reads). She also said that based on the size of the data the results would be paginated, resulting in more reads (however, the documentation online says "1 read regardless of the number of columns/rows"). It is also possible that the steps in power query are all being counted as Reads. 
Has anyone else encountered this issue or been able to determine what activity in PBI is driving high read counts? If QB provides answers to this I will update the thread.

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Sarah Weeden
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Service plans and billing

12 Replies

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  • SarahWeeden's avatar
    SarahWeeden
    Qrew Trainee
    3 years ago
    As per QB: 

    An Integration Read is:

    • An API call sent from a 3rd party system, that involves a read of data from Quickbase
    • An API call that requests record information from Quickbase, whether 1 record, 100 records, or 1M records.
      QB has not provided threshold limits after which data would be paginated.

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      Sarah Weeden
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      • DonLarson's avatar
        DonLarson
        Qrew Commander
        2 years ago
        Sarah,

        Has "Reads" impacted your QB plan or performance?   I have a customer asking about Reads and I am not sure how to answer.


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        Don Larson
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        • SarahWeeden's avatar
          SarahWeeden
          Qrew Trainee
          2 years ago
          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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