Comments on: When is a refresh not a refresh?

By: Maew

Maew — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 18:47:31 +0000

According to your comment above, I guess that the SharePoint server need to have an access to the data sources in order to refresh the latest data?

My scenario is that I created a PowerPivot workbook in an isolated system that can reach to the specific databases. If I want to publish this workbook to sharepoint site that does not have an access to my data sources, it will not pull the new data from the sources?? Is that right?

By: powerpivotgeek

powerpivotgeek — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 06:11:25 +0000

Great question Ernest.
When in Excel Services, if you “refresh the connection” then you are telling Excel Services to go to the PowerPivot SSAS instance and refresh Excel Services view of the embedded data in the workbook. Since the embedded data is a copy of the information pulled into the workbook when the data is imported, this means that you aren’t really reaching out to the original data sources, instead you are refreshing the pivot cache inside Excel Services. Normally the data hasn’t changed, so there is no real effect. Clicking on a slicer requeries the data but since Excel Services hasn’t likely already read the data for that slice, it does change both the workbook data rendered and the pivot cache.

To actually refresh the embedded database that lives inside the workbook, you have to use the PowerPivot Data Refresh facility. In that case, we do actually reach out to all of the original data sources (although you can control which source will be used for a given schedule) and we do re-write the actual workbook in SharePoint (a new file is created with update data).

Hope that helps.

By: Ernest Ostrander

Ernest Ostrander — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:57:01 +0000

Excellent article. I’m cross-referencing other sources, and in this article, http://powerpivotgeek.com/2009/12/11/excel-services-delegation/, it states that clicking on a slicer refreshes the data. How does that relate to the refresh processing in this article? I feel led to believe that merely clicking on a slicer is sufficient to refresh data from the source.

Keep up the posts. I’m reading all I can find on PowerPivot!