Power BI — change detection

Today I will show you how to implement a change detection in Power BI. It gives you a possibility to refresh a report automatically within a specified range of time.

Our example is a [Badges] table. A connection type is a Direct Query. I’ve filtered two statuses and added a measure named Quantity. Now, we have 43 rows.

Quantity = COUNTROWS(Badges)

Next step is to configure the Change Detection functionality. In this case, I set checking for data changes which influences on the Quantity measure.

Next step is to select a Change detection in a Page Refresh section.

After you publish the report to the Power BI service. The service checks if data in a data source is changed every minute. If this change influences on a selected measure, the report is automatically updated.

After two records are added to the source table, the visual is automatically updated.

It is a better alternative to the Auto Page Refresh functionality which refreshes an entire page even if nothing has been changed.