Automatic refreshing of controls with SPICE Incremental Refresh

Question & Answer
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We recently switched our SPICE refresh schedules from 1-hour full to 1-hour incremental. Full refreshes were becoming increasingly expensive and inefficient as our customer datasets grow. It’s not a scalable solution.

But now we’re finding that the control options do not automatically refresh. We don’t want to make our customers have to manually refresh the controls every time they visit their dashboards.

This post seems very close, if not identical, to our issue:

No one seems to mention anywhere that the issue is related to incremental vs. full SPICE refresh.

I’ve also been advised through a support ticket that this is a feature request for incremental refreshes.

Any other suggestions or workarounds for handling this?

I’ve thought to add a daily full refresh in addition to the 1-hour incremental refresh, but that seems like it would be confusing for our customers.

1 Like
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Hi @Kelley_Nelson,

One thing you can try is create separate datasets to link to your controls.

  1. Create a parameter.
  2. Create a filter that goes across datasets.
  3. Use the parameter in your filter.
  4. Create a control for your parameter and link it to the dataset that you created specifically for your control.

For example, if you have a control to filter by company name, create a dataset that just contains unique company names and use that for your control. That dataset will likely be much smaller than your main dataset, so you’ll be able to use a full refresh on it.

2 Likes
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Thank you, David. I will look into whether it makes sense to modify our backend data processing to use this approach.

We do have multiple controls and use the “relevant controls” option, so it’s a bit more complicated, but the same idea applies.

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Yes, it’s more complicated if you use the “relevant controls” option because that option only works when for controls that are linked to the same dataset.

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Hi @Kelley_Nelson, did this solution work for you? I am marking this reply as, “Solution,” but let us know if this is not resolved. Thanks for posting your questions on the QuickSight Community!