Power BI with Microsoft access / CSV file

[Ganesh1984]

Are there any real advantages to connect Power BI to a Microsoft access database as opposed to a CSV file? Is there any special benefit one over the other.  Also by connecting Power BI to Access would it allow incremental refresh or would the entire data set get refreshed?

[lbendlin · Accepted solution]

CSV is orders of magnitude faster to ingest than Access. It also plays nice with the gateway.

Neither support incremental refresh natively, but you can bend them a little depending on the nature of your data. For example if you only ever add new CSV files and never change existing files then you can create an incremental refresh setup based on file date time.