Most of my reports work off large amounts of data fetched from a REST API. Occasionally, I need to create additional tables in the query editor to do things that are difficult in DAX. This works great except that for each additional query I have added, Power BI makes an additional REST request for the same data. I see the same behavior when the report is deployed to PowerBI Service.
I created these additional queries by right-clicking the original query and selecting "Reference", but I guess that doesn't do what I would expect. Is there any way to optimize this such that it only makes one request?
Similar unanswered question: https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Desktop/Reference-query-in-Query-Editor-vs-creating-calculated-tabl...
What exactly is "Reference" supposed to do? As it stands, it seems functionally identical to "Duplicate".
