Chris Webb continues a series n troubleshooting timeouts:
In the first post in this series I showed how any Power BI dataset refresh started via the Power BI portal or API is limited to 2 hours in Shared capacity and 5 hours in Premium capacity, and how you could work around that by running a refresh via Premium’s XMLA endpoint feature. In the second post in this series I showed how some M functions allow you to set timeouts. However, even if you initiate a refresh via the XMLA endpoint you may still get a timeout error and in this post I’ll discuss another reason why: the External Command Timeout.
Read on to see what the external command timeout is and when it might strike.