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Small and medium business | Business Central, N...
Answered

Timeouts when using BC API with PowerBI

Posted on by 5

Hi There,

Site Details:

* It is a Dynamics365 BC environment.

* We are using PowerBI with the BusinessCentralAPI connection

* Was a recent data migration from Navision where most of Navision's history was brought over. (Sales invoices, GL etc.)

* We use the webservices API (legacy) and it is fairly stable, slow but does work. The new API however seems to have issues.

* Customer has asked if there is something the vendor might be able to do to improve the performance but they have not been helpful so I am trying this forum to see if there is any advice that can help out there.

Background:

I've been trying to use Power BI to load generalLedgerEntries and expand the dimesionSetLines to get the related SalesInvoice ID.

If I run just the generalLedgerEntries it take anywhere from 2 to 4 hours to pull down the 7 million records.

If i try to expand any of the related dimenstionsets (e.g. the Sales Invoice line) it runs for 10 plus hours and returns a timeout error. Sometimes it says if might be an OLE DB or ODBC error. Unable to read from transport connection because of buffer space or an API 500 Internal Server error. 

Obviously seems like it is being pushed too hard. Is this common with larger dataset sizes in BC using the APIs?

I'm recommending to the Business that we write an App to call the API in smaller chucks that downloads and caches this data in a database but they asked me to check and see if the vendor may not have setup the site correctly and that is why it can't handle these larger requests. Is that scenario likely?

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks

  • Jan Hoglund Profile Picture
    Jan Hoglund 35 on at
    RE: Timeouts when using BC API with PowerBI

    Typically that would be timeout and/or Internal Server errror.

    I suspect that this is temporary with Microsoft related to technical development of the BC platform in Azure and it seems to be getting more stable the past year. BC and the API 2.0 is of course still under development and will get more powerful with every release.

    Reading your question again I see that you are not woriking SaaS in Azure but rather on-prem? If so, you might have other problems than API-related. You should check overall performance of other parts of the system. Perhaps it's network related? Server memory? Bad hardware?

    Good luck!

  • Suggested answer
    LCCH Profile Picture
    LCCH 5 on at
    RE: Timeouts when using BC API with PowerBI

    Thank you Jan. I've passed on your comments and hope they agree.

    When you say "choke" what error would you normally see?

    Thanks

  • Verified answer
    Jan Hoglund Profile Picture
    Jan Hoglund 35 on at
    RE: Timeouts when using BC API with PowerBI

    Hi!

    There are operational limitations on the API:

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/administration/operational-limits-online

    My experience is that the API in BC chokes on even smaller data transfer volumes than the limitations so you are on the right track looking at a data warehouse solution for your PBI solution. A G/L with 7m records is not that big but still a fair chunk of data and should not be transferred all at once. The initial charge should be limited using e.g. date, one year at a time. 

    //Jan

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