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srk_powerbi's avatar
srk_powerbi
Helper II
5 years ago
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Incremental Refresh question -help

Hi, 

i have a question about how incremental refresh works.

1. can we implement incremental refresh without a Date field in fact table? and My table does not have date field and, only has datekey in the format of integer number its not in the format 'mmddyyyy'. 

 

2. There are last 10 yrs data so Initially i load  data from 2018 and above and set up incremental refresh. But in future, i i want data from before 2018, can we load that?

 

please suggest

Need Help
  • v-jingzhang's avatar
    v-jingzhang
    5 years ago

    Hi srk_powerbi 

    Can you map your dates to actual calendar dates? If yes, you can add a custom column into the fact table which contains calendar dates mapping to original integer dates, then filter the rows based on this new calendar date column. If these integer dates cannot be mapped to calendar dates, I'm afraid it may be impossible to configure incremental refresh. When you publish the report into the service, Power BI will identify the datetime range partition based on the service time. It is not able to understand non-standard dates.

     

    For your second question, when you load data in Power BI Desktop, you can set up any dates for RangeStart and RangeEnd parameters. You can import small data which is enough to create the report. But when you configure incremental refresh, you need to set up store rows in the last 10 years if you want to hold 10 years' data in the dataset. After you publish the report into the service, the first refresh in the Power BI service will import all 10 full calendar years historical data. Subsequent refreshes are incremental and will not refresh historical data. If you don't import enough historical data, you will not be able to load them into the dataset in the future. In that situation, you can only modify the incremental refresh policy in Power BI Desktop and publish the report into the service again to perform a new first refresh.

     

    Reference:

    Incremental refresh in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Docs

    How to configure Incremental Refreshing in Power BI with DateKey or Date (instead of the default DateTime)

     

    Kindly let me know if this helps.
    Community Support Team _ Jing
    If this post helps, please Accept it as the solution to help other members find it.

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