Refreshing incrementally

For data sources that support queries being pushed down, Power Query can use incremental refresh. This is used mostly on fact tables that have a column to indicate the date/time the rows were updated, and there are no changes to historical data – minimum updates to rows. This useful design pattern is considered for improving refresh speeds on large data imports. By default, Power BI requires a full load of all tables when a semantic model is using Import mode. This means all the existing data in the table is discarded before the refresh operation, and it ensures that the latest data is loaded into the semantic model.

However, this results in unchanged historical data being loaded into the semantic model each time it is refreshed. If you know that you have source data that is only ever appended and historical records are never modified, you can configure individual tables to use incremental refresh to load just the most recent data. The following steps...