Connect to and manage a Power BI Premium semantic model using the XMLA endpoint for read/write operations such as partition refresh and metadata deployment
Ensure the workspace is on a Power BI Premium, Premium Per User, or Embedded capacity and that the XMLA Endpoint setting is set to Read Write in the capacity admin settings
Copy the XMLA endpoint URL from the workspace settings page; it follows the format powerbi://api.powerbi.com/v1.0/myorg/WorkspaceName
Connect using a client that supports Analysis Services XMLA protocol, such as SQL Server Management Studio, Tabular Editor, or the Analysis Services client libraries (ADOMD.NET / AMO)
To refresh a specific partition, use the Tabular Object Model (TOM) library to connect, navigate to the target table's Partitions collection, call RequestRefresh on the partition, and then call Model.SaveChanges() to commit
For automated deployments, use the XMLA endpoint in combination with the ALM Toolkit or a script using the Microsoft.AnalysisServices.Tabular NuGet package to deploy metadata changes without overwriting data
Known gotchas
Read Write XMLA access must be explicitly enabled at the capacity level; workspaces on the capacity inherit the setting, but individual workspace admins cannot override it if the capacity admin has set it to Read Only
Some operations available via XMLA are not exposed through the Power BI REST API; partition-level refresh scheduling and metadata-only deployments require XMLA and cannot be substituted with the REST API alone
Direct Lake semantic models in Microsoft Fabric have different refresh semantics than Import models; not all XMLA partition refresh operations apply to Direct Lake tables and may return unsupported operation errors
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