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Refresh

dbt Charts Cloud

This page describes dbt Charts Cloud, the hosted product — these features are not part of the open source dct engine.

A dashboard's charts run queries against your database. Refresh policy decides when those queries actually re-run, versus when a viewer sees a cached result.

What's Cloud-owned

Refresh in Cloud is manual: a dashboard re-runs its queries when someone asks it to. There is no scheduled refresh — no cadence, timezone, event trigger, retry or notification settings — and none of that is configurable anywhere in the product today.

Who can trigger a refresh follows the same path-based access model as viewing and editing: refreshing is one of the capabilities a role can carry, so whoever holds an Editor-level (or custom) grant with that capability at a path can refresh it. Anyone holding it sees a manual refresh control in the dashboard's own toolbar. Like access, that binding is Cloud state keyed to a dashboard's path, not something in your project's YAML or git history.

The manual refresh button among the dashboard's other toolbar actions

What core gives you

Running dbt Charts on its own (dct serve or dct render), you control freshness directly through the query-result cache. By default the cache is in-memory and lasts only as long as the server process; every restart is a clean refresh. Point --cache <path> (or DCT_CACHE_PATH) at a file to persist the cache across restarts, or pass --no-cache to re-run every query on every request. See the dct serve reference for the full set of caching flags.

Cloud builds on these same primitives; a manual refresh is what decides when to invalidate and re-run, not a different query or storage mechanism underneath.