Alternative methods for incremental refresh for PowerBI Pro

[Anonymous]

For starters, I don't have the premium service so as far as i am aware do not have the access to the incremental refresh feature on the desktop. Although following the various articles on how a premium user would use incremental refresh i am able to do quite a few steps..

1. As per below image, i am able to go into Options and tick "Incremental Refresh Policies". From there, as per the various articles/forum posts go into query editor (manage parameters) and set a RangeStart and RangeEnd date

which are then applied as a custom date filter on a date column. I then close query editor and right click the query in the field section of the report layout.

When I do this, i get the following pop up which comes up with an error. Following the instructions online, it appears that the "native query" is deselected in each of the applied steps. Not sure if this is because of the file source being a folder instead of from a SQL server, or that i don't have PowerBI Premium..

Regardless of the fact, it appears it is not possible for me to incrementally refresh from when my source data is from a folder in which there is numerous files within this. As the year has progressed, and the volume of files has increased the time it takes to refresh a query is taking longer and longer. 

Is anyone aware of any workarounds/loopholes/tricks on if it is possible to enable some sort of feature where it stores all the historic files and only looks into the most recent (say 5 days) worth of files to speed up the process? Whether this be on the PowerBI service or desktop...

[d_gosbell]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Is anyone aware of any workarounds/loopholes/tricks on if it is possible to enable some sort of feature where it stores all the historic files and only looks into the most recent (say 5 days) worth of files to speed up the process? Whether this be on the PowerBI service or desktop...

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No, the only options for incremental processing is Power BI Premium or using Analysis Services (on prem) or Azure Analysis Services. The standard Power BI service and desktop don't expose the API's required to do this.