Do all web sites set random errors to occur when trying to retrieve data from their websites?
I am using PQ to extract data from a website, after every few attempts it fails with this error:-
"Data could not be retrieved from the database"
"Check the database server or contact your database administrator. Make sure the external database is available, and then try the operation again".
When I click refresh all in the file for a second time it works.
Any help greatly appreciated 🙂
Hi Gary,
Welcome to our forum! I wonder if it's limiting the amount of data you can extract at one time. Many sites have limits like this.
Mynda
Hi Gary,
It could also be that you're request is taking too long to complete. Web servers have a timeout on the length a request has to execute. If you're asking for data and it takes too long to get it, the server will generate an error.
Hard to say for sure without seeing your query and running it against the database.
regards
Phil
I got this error message one time, and sometimes the error message descriptions in Power Query are not that helpful.
The cause was in fact related to me using the "combine all spreadsheets in a SharePoint folder", and a rogue spreadsheet had been added in that folder that did not contain the expected table. Once I added the expected table into the spreadsheet (just with zero values), it then worked okay.
I could have deleted (or moved) the spreadsheet from that folder, but presumably someone put it there for a reason.
Make sure that the original data file is not open.
