Append a table to another without deleting previous information

[JaviCaponte]

Hello dear Community hope you can help, and excuses in advanced if this have been addressed before.

Is there a way to append tables, in order to create historical table, with deleting the older data already stored?
My source file from SalesForce is like a photo at a period in time, that is brought to PBI just once a month.
I'm looking to update this PBI report (Once a month) with the new data the next month but without deleting the older data from the previous month I last updated.

Not necessarily the new information would be a follow up of the previous, but they would indeed have the same format. 

I'm not sure if there is a way to do this with Invoke Functions or some sort, like duplicating my Source query and prevent it from refreshing but append to this the new data that has just been brought on my first query. The trick is that this should be automatic and not for one-time only.

Hopefully this makes sense. 

[BA_Pete]

Hi @JaviCaponte ,

It sounds like you want to use incremental refresh.

I'll not explain all the in's and out's as it's a fairly in-depth (not difficult though) process which is specifically tailored to your use-case, but it sounds like it will do EXACTLY what you want.

What I will say though: if you decide to do this, make sure that your PBIX file you implement it on is in it's final production state and that it can stand the test of time as, once you've switched incremental refresh on, you can't turn it off again without losing all your historical data that you've accrued to that point.

Info here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/incremental-refresh-overview 

Pete

[JaviCaponte]

Thanks Pete, 

But what if the new data (for example: February's Sales Data) has nothing to do with the old one (January's)?

The format and columns are the same, but it is just randomly new data of information. Februarys File is just a snapshot at a time. 

Will Incremental Refresh show me this new information appended to the previous one?

Thanks as always in advanced.

I think the problem as well is that I do not think Incremental Refresh allows me to download the info later

[BA_Pete · Accepted solution]

Hi @JaviCaponte ,

When you say "randomly new data" I presume you mean it is the same data points, but for a different time period?

If so then yes, incremental refresh (IR) will just append your February data onto whatever has been accrued before it. What is retained as the 'History' partition will be based on how you set your IR up in the Service. There's also a number of other parameters/settings you can adjust that will affect what information is retained as history, at what granularity, and for how long etc. but ultimately IR will add new snapshot data onto retained historical data and store it for as long as you tell it (within reason, I believe).

I think you are correct in that you can't later download this incremental data. However, if you set up IR on a golden dataset rather than just a single report, this IR data will be available to any/all other PBI reports you want to build on it. Additionally, if you really want to be able to get the data into Excel for some reason, you can connect to the IR dataset using the 'Analyse in Excel' function in the Service and get a live connection to it from Excel.

Pete

[JaviCaponte]

Thanks Pete, I'll Accept this as a solution then. Kudos!