Our users are complaining about receiving this icon
(with the moving bars) while trying to open a dashboard. QS will display no other message. It’s occuring while the underlying SPICE dataset is being refreshed. Nothing happens even when the refresh of the SPICE dataset has finished. I can even open a new tab in the same browser and successfully open the dashboard, but the original tab will still show the vertical bars moving up and down.
Note: some datasets can be refreshed in as little as 9 minutes, others take as long as 90 minutes.
to quote a very colonial phrase “the sun never sets on our usage of QuickSight”. We have users in most time zones around the world, so there’s never a good time to refresh a dataset, just “less bad” times.
Was there a recent change to the behavior of dashboards, when they are opened and the underlying datasource is a spice dataset that is being refreshed? I’m trying remember what the old behavior was. I suspect it was that the dashboard did open, just on an old version of the dataset.
Please note, we have not made any structural changes to the dataset, ie modifications to the metadata. The spice dataset is being refreshed on a scheduled basis to bring in the new data for the last 24 hours.
Yes, we should consider incremental refreshes, where possible. Incremental works great for streaming data, but at first glance, it appears to be a non-trivial exercise, when the datasource is fact tables joined to dimension tables (where changing a description of a code in a dimension table can change historical data as well as current data).
Regarding incremental refresh, are you able to create separate datasets for your fact table and dimension table and do an incremental refresh on both separately? You can then create a third dataset to join the first and second datasets.
I haven’t tried this myself but I’m wondering if this would work.
What’s really interesting is that we have two dashboards on the same dataset. One will open while the dataset is refreshing, and the second dashboard will NOT open while the dataset is refreshing. It won’t even do anything after the dataset finishes. It just displays the vertical bar chart icon with the rising/falling bars.
Hi Charles, expected end user experience during SPICE data refresh is that, in analysis you will see no data (and then partial data as rows start to come into SPICE) during refresh. however in dashboard there is no downtime - old data set is preserved until new one 100% complete and then they are swapped. If your dashboards visual rendering is not happening during the time of data refresh, can you raise support ticket.
Hi Charles, are you still experiencing this issue? Did Anwar’s explanation above help? If not and you would like to create a support ticket, here are the steps to open a support case. If your company has someone who manages your AWS account, you might not have direct access to AWS Support and will need to raise an internal ticket to your IT team or whomever manages your AWS account. They should be able to open an AWS Support case on your behalf. Hope this helps!. I’ll mark this as a solution, but please let us know if this needs further attention and we can roll it back.
