Edit data set that has incremental refresh enabled

[anilthapa11]

I built a data set and a report using PBI Desktop (March 2020). Enabled the incremental refresh in two of the tables and pusblished it to the premium capacity. In the service, I setup the refresh schedule and everything is up and running great.

However the problem I am now running into is one of the table in that data model frequently addes new columns and those newly added columns need to be a part of the data model for reporting. In order to do that, I have to download the PBIX file which I can not as Incremental Refresh is enabled. So what do I do to update the data model to bring in these new columns ?

There will be so many cases to update the data set once published with Incremental refresh, like my case above or we can not always assume the schema of the data model will never change. 

[uyendokim]

I might be late here for this discussion. But somehow my determination might help, in case I'm not missunderstanding the point 🙂

Initially in Power BI Service, you can click on the dataset, and set Large dataset storage format to Off as below capture. Then you can download your dashboard along with data model as it is to your local and continue editing on data model.

But this way may be suitable for small dataset (< 100 MB), large dataset definitely should go with Tabular.

And this way only works for PPU and Premium capacity.

[GilbertQ]

Hi there

This would happen in any scenario where there are new columns being added.

You would have to have a copy of the original PBIX, go into the PBIX and make the required changes, adding the new columns, measures, etc.

Then upload this to the Power BI Service and do a manual refresh to get the incremental refresh set up again.

In other systems such as SSAS/AAS this is how it also has always been done.

[anilthapa11 · Accepted solution]

At least for Power BI data sets I do not agree that we have to start from the scratch because we had metadata changes. I found this document and it explains how this can be done without loosing all the historical data. I have not tried it yet but something I will definitely give a shot. 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-premium-incremental-refresh#metadata-only-deployme...

[GilbertQ]

Ahh apologies for that I forgot that you were on Power BI Premium.

Yes this can be done with either the upcoming ALM toolkit or Tabular Editor and make the changes.

You would then connect to the XMLA end point (After enabling the Read/Write functionality)

[Aditya_07]

@GilbertQ Can you please elaborate on steps how a power Bi premium user can download the data model which has incremental refresh applied on it... with the the help of Tabular Editor...

[GilbertQ]

Hi @Aditya_07 

you cannot download the data model once incremental refresh has occured. The only thing I can think of is to backup the data model if the data model is in PPU or Premium?