Alpha Serve Power BI Connector

Hello Sebastian,

Thank you for reaching out to us.

As you may know, according to our request Shopify has granted us permission to allow our users to export orders for the whole period. Since then the data preparation time on Shopify's side has greatly increased. As a consequence, the number of timeout errors in Power BI increased, too. Data preparation fully depends on Shopify, we do not control the process and the data preparation time always varies. E.g. according to the log files, data preparation time varies from seconds to hours, and for some cases, it reaches 7 hours. To avoid Power BI timeouts errors the process was split into two parts: data preparation in Shopify and data refresh in Power BI.

When you set up continuous data preparation for your source, data preparation automatically starts after the previous has finished. You are able to get fresh data multiple times during the day by refreshing your data set in Power BI while the data preparation process runs in the background in Shopify. Data preparation time depends on the amount of data chosen for export. You can check the last time data has been prepared in the 'Prepared at' column.

Please note that due to Shopify API limitations, data preparation can be done one at a time. In case you create more than one source with continuous data preparation, data preparation will automatically start for the first source after the data preparation for the second source has been finished.

Hope this explains how continuous update works.

Please let me know if you have further questions or concerns. Your feedback is valuable to us.

Kind regards,
Alpha Serve Support Team