Incremental refresh for free in Power BI

As you probably are aware, incremental refresh is a premium feature only, but with some DAX magic, you can get incremental refresh for free on Desktop and service!! Watch the video to learn how.


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QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? SUGGESTIONS? You’ll find me here:
Twitter ► @curbalen, @ruthpozuelo

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[bradj]

The extra info you provided about if you use merge vs union affects what tables actual get refreshed is CRITICAL! Thank you! I actually have a Premier license and still want to use this method of creating multiple partitions of 1 fact table and then merging vs importing all data into 1 huge fact table, because I'm importing 1.4 billion records and if I try to bring it all in at once, it will either take 8hrs +, crash the SQL Server (runs out of RAM @ 64gb) or drop the connection lol. So knowing that a merge (aka join) will refresh all the associated tables (even when you tell Power Query not too) is a MAJOR key. Looks like I'll be using the union option like you did. Thanks again!

[nawaazr]

Thanks Ruth, this saved me a lot of waiting around for large tables to refresh!

[rauljimenez]

As usual, your tips are simple, elegant and extremely useful. Thank you very much!!

[ihebchafai]

@Curbal thank you, it's possible to define a parametre that always have the current year as a default value ? or can i use M language ?

[matthewhollahan]

Cool stuff, thanks for the info! Is there a way to remove duplicates from the new joined table?

[tri-supplycompany]

Saved me so much time! Thank you for this! Very easy to follow your instructions. You're a great teacher!

[Tattysnuc]

Hi Ruth
Fairly new to PowerBI, so have only just discovered your channel. Thanks for the great guides.

Does this still work through the scheduled refresh as opposed to the manual one you demonstrate?

Many thanks

[cynthiasamson]

My incremental refresh didn't work on flat files so this was such a life saver for me! Thank you!!!

[rajeshdhiman]

Hey Ruth
Thank you for all great videos. I learn alot from your tutorials. Right now with Union command I am having problem, whenever I use UNION it changes decimal data points to TEXT which I cannot revert it back. Is there any suggestion by specifying the datasets before doing UNION or after UNION. Thank You

[Bharath_PBI]

Hi Ruth: incremental refresh can not be set up on a dual storage table and requires import mode. But having a fact agg table in import mode and base fact in direct query, will injection happen from import to DQ query which is sent to db? If yes how's the performance on large models?

[kolasrikanth]

have been watching your videos all the time. It's really helpful for us. I really appreciate your help. Thanks is a small word. YOU DESERVE MORE THAN THAT. 🙏

[JW-muoh]

OMG! This is so much easier than the other tutorials I've seen. THANK YOU!

[filipwinski]

Hello Ruth! Great tip!!! Great video!!! Happy New Year!!!

[mchandrasekhar]

Great Ruth!
Wishing you a very Happy New Year!

[shooben]

Wow thanks a lot! Back to work today and tried this and it works perfectly! ⭐️

[fegaru]

Hi! Do you need to the table had some relation between them before you use union? Or are they just unrelated tables?

[someshkhatawe]

Hi Ruth,
I am able to do this on my local but once the report is published on service the entire report is getting refreshed because the ' Include in report refresh' feature only works on the power Bi desktop and not on service.

[NotYourAverageJoeRogan]

Love this thank you! This worked for me. In my case, I am pulling data from Azure DevOps and the historical snapshot data is at the daily level, so theoretically I only need to refresh for the current day.

The mechanism I am using is a parameter, to distinguish between the historical data range and the current/refreshable data range.

Question: When I change the parameter value in PBI desktop, it does prompt me to refresh the historical table, even though data load is turned off (which is good!).

Will a report published to a workspace do the same thing? In other words, when I change the parameter on the PBI service, will it somehow prompt the user to refresh the historical table even though data load is turned off for that table? Would be fantastic for my situation if so. Thank you!

[ayobamiologun]

Very cool. Thanks for sharing this, Ruth.
Happy New Year...

[Dimiliv]

You superstar :-) thanks for this. Happy new year btw!