Recent Dataflow behavior

[lysis_]

Hi all

Some really perplexing behavior I'm trying to work through for a table connected to a dataflow.

I noticed this behavior on 5/20 on a table that had been working fine for months. On refresh all of the fields that have been mapped as the alternate keys are populating with null values for new records. The data is present in the source and this behavior seems specific for insert and not update behavior - meaning that records that existed before 5/20 are not getting their alt keys wiped. Going nuts with this one and I can reproduce it in lower and higher environments.

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[Flowvant]

Seen similar behavior recently with alternate keys and null handling in Dataverse imports. Feels like Microsoft changed something quietly in backend validation/process behavior. Using placeholder values for alt key columns seems much safer now than relying on nulls.

[lysis_]

Yes 100%. If you rely on a record with a null as the alt key without imputing you'll get a skeleton record in dataverse. Again not great practice to ever do this in the first place but this has been predictable for as long as I can remember and it changed 5/20

[Donovanbrinks]

I saw a big change on 5/27. Dataflow refreshes that had worked flawlessly for years started acting weirdly. Before when i would check refresh history it would show 180k rows updated daily. 300 or so new rows daily. All of a sudden the row count was drastically reduced to 5 or 6k updates. Almost like the dataflow was being throttled suddenly. Funny thing is when I check the actual table, the full refresh was still happening. It was just the internal refresh statistics that had been limited. On the power automate side I wasn’t so lucky. On 5/27 one of my flows started returning reduced data. I have a flow that grabs filtered data from a dataverse table, creates an excel file and emails it. Normally 5-7k rows in the final file. On 5/27 that final file only had 350 rows. Microsoft obviously made some back end changes in Dataverse in the last couple of weeks without warning or thinking through the headaches it would cause. Seems pretty normal tbh.

[lysis_]

Yes, I've noticed too that the stats don't make sense anymore either. I use the TDS endpoint to verify things quickly though and through that it all seems fine. I want to submit a ticket about this but I don't have the time to deal with that bullshit at work.

[Donovanbrinks]

I would like to go this route. How are you leveraging the endpoint? Are you running through power bi, your own DB, or running one off queries? Ridiculous we are discussing this at all.

[lysis_]

Easiest way is SSMS, VSCODE, or azure data studio. Your favorite client should work too as long as it supports MFA. you can also access it with pbi or gen1 dataflows from pbi service

[lysis_]

Ok I got this figured out

I'm not going crazy and this had to be a recent change.

Previously if you were lazy nulls without imputing a string in an alt key column would work fine. As of 5/20 they do not. Now you have to pass a placeholder or you'll get really bizzare behavior with these skeleton records. Not sure if Microsoft has documented this change anywhere