Incremental Refresh | What should I be looking out for?

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

I've been watching a lot of videos on Incremental Refresh on Youtube and reading a lot of documentation. A lot of people say to be very careful with this. I want to understand what exactly I have to be concerned about.

In my case, I am not using direct query only doing the import mode. I set my parameters very wide so I can keep all the data. Is there anything I should be looking out for or be concerned about when setting up the incremental refresh?

[v-jingzhang · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous 

I think the main concerns are introduced in this official document: Incremental refresh for datasets in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

I would like to highlight below behavior in Incremental refresh. There are some earlier posts in the forum that hope to bring updated historical data into the dataset. However, this is not available. Historical data will only be brought into the dataset in the initial refresh in Power BI Service. Once rows with a date/time become part of the historical period, no matter how data is updated or even removed in the data source, these changes cannot be brought into the dataset in Power BI Service. So if you want to configure incremental refresh for a table, consider the duration for the refresh and historical range. This is important. 

Another concern is that once you have published a model with incremental refresh policies to the service, it cannot be downloaded to local computers again. If you modify the local report and publish it again, it will remove any existing partitions and data already in the dataset. When you refresh the dataset in the service for the first time, it would be a new full refresh.  

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Community Support Team _ Jing
If this post helps, please Accept it as the solution to help other members find it.

[parry2k]

@Anonymous what is your concern? I'm implemented many incremental refresh solutions for my clients and never ran into any issue, if you make sure you are configuring as per documentation I don't think you should be concerned about anything. If there is any specific question/area you are concerned with, let me know.

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