Incremental refresh and hybrid tables
Incremental refresh or incremental data loading is a renowned technique for controlling how the data loads into a data store, so we keep the existing data and only load the changes. Let us look at it in more detail.
From a technical standpoint in data movement, there are always two options to transfer the data from location A to location B:
- Truncation and load: Transferring the entire data from location A to location B by truncating location B and reloading the entire data from location A to B.
- Incremental load: Transferring the data from location A to location B only the first time. The next time, we only load the data changes from A to B. In this approach, we never truncate B. Instead, we only transfer the data that exists in A but not in B.
Incremental refresh detects updated data as deleting the old data and inserting new data.
When we refresh the data in Power BI, if we have not configured an...