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 dr...
Forum Discussion
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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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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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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Unfortunately, I have similar problem but reading Quickbase by DOMO.
1) Consume lots of reads2) When DOMO reads my app performance drops dramatically, especially when we read tables with formula Queries.
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Adam Krzyzanek
------------------------------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
------------------------------- Mark has indicated exporting csv files from Quickbase via pipelines on a scheduled basis is a viable technical option - is there a financial cost associated with this approach?--
