Issues with OpenAlex API in Power BI since Walden launch

[S Fattori]

Hi everyone,

Since the Walden launch last week, I’ve been experiencing frequent problems using the OpenAlex API directly in Power BI via Power Query. Previously, moderate-size requests, like retrieving an institution’s body of work (~40k items), worked fine and completed in about 20 minutes.
Now, when I try the same queries, the update often fails with error:

OLE DB or ODBC error: Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040E4E.

This error typically occurs at the very end of the refresh, after a large portion of the data has already been downloaded. I’ve tried multiple attempts, and it fails most of the time.
Has anyone else noticed similar behavior since the Walden release? Could this be related to API changes, rate limits, or timeouts? 

Thanks in advance for helping!

Silvia Fattori

[Samuel Mok]

It could be the same issue as we've been discussing on the other discussion thread running at the moment;  started by Ivo, most recent response by Ed today:

https://groups.google.com/g/openalex-community/c/_ySHE1WvYVo

Otherwise we'll need more details from your script to investigate, this is just a generic error that could be anything!

Cheers,

Samuel 

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[Ed Summers]

Hi Silvia,

Does Power BI surface the API calls that it is doing for you? How are you retrieving your institutions body of work?

Like Samuel said it could be a similar issue to what I ran into this weekend with a similar set of queries we run to collect records from faculty. Basically one bad (too large?) record in the bunch is causing our pipeline to fail. If you could share your API URL I could run a test to see if that’s the case.

//Ed

[S Fattori]

Hi,

Thanks for the quick responses.

Here’s a bit more context. I’m pulling OpenAlex data directly into Power BI via Power Query. The main query ("publications") recursively calls the API using cursors, and then I have several dependent tables ("authors", "topics", "funders", etc.) that expand nested fields from the publications table. Here’s the type of API call I use inside Power BI: 

https://api.openalex.org/works?filter=authorships.institutions.ror:https://ror.org/008xxew50|https://ror.org/00q6h8f30|https://ror.org/0286p1c86,publication_year:2020-2024&per-page=100&cursor=*

And this is the specific PowerQuery set up I built to retrieve records from OpenAlex:

    GetWorks = (rors as list, year as text, cursor as text) =>
        let
            BaseUrl = "https://api.openalex.org/works",
            params = [Query=[filter="authorships.institutions.ror:" & Text.Combine(rors, "|") & ",publication_year:" & year,
                                cursor=cursor,
                                #"per-page"="100",
                                mailto="email address"]],
            Page = Json.Document(Web.Contents(BaseUrl, params)),
            Page_res = List.Transform(Page[results], each Record.SelectFields(_, {"id", "display_name", "doi", "open_access", "cited_by_count", "authorships", "topics","fwci", "sustainable_development_goals", "countries_distinct_count","institutions_distinct_count","abstract_inverted_index","type","is_paratext","grants"})),
            Results = if not(Page[meta][next_cursor]=null) then List.Combine({Page_res, @GetWorks(rors, year, Page[meta][next_cursor])}) else Page_res
        in
            Results,
    GetOA = (rors as list, year as text) =>
        let
            Table = Table.FromRecords(GetWorks(rors, year, "*"))
        in
            Table

This setup used to work very well before the Walden release. Since last week, the behavior has changed:
- If I refresh everything together, it fails, usually at the very end, after a very long refresh (more than one hour).
- If I refresh tables one by one, I have a higher chance of success, but still get frequent failures (same error).
The error message is: 

"OLE DB or ODBC error: Exception from HRESULT: 0x80040E4E"

Any hints about what could be causing the problem would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Silvia

Op maandag 10 november 2025 om 14:27:28 UTC+1 schreef e...@pobox.com: