Forum Discussion

victoriavd's avatar
victoriavd
Frequent Visitor
6 years ago

Tracking refreshed data changes

Hi,

 

I`ve got a big table with no date column in it, refreshing every day, but the new row or two is added only once or twice a week.

 

I would like to get the dates  of new entries, but do not want to meddle with incremental refresh.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks in advance

Need Help

4 Replies

  • parry2k's avatar
    parry2k
    Super User
    6 years ago

    victoriavd if your source doesn't have a date stamp and you are doing the import, no way you can tag the new records with the date, because every time you refresh, it pulls the whole dataset. Not sure what you are trying to achieve with this date, there might be other solutions to handle the problem if you provide some more context on what you are trying to achieve.

     

     

    • victoriavd's avatar
      victoriavd
      Frequent Visitor
      6 years ago

      Thanks ,

       

      Yes, it seems like you are right, as it imports the whole dataset each time - no chance to track changes....

      But that is exactly what I want....

      My table has the following structure:

       

      product_ID

      Rate

      21212121

      100

       

      What I would like PBI to do is in some way to compare the old table (before todays refresh) and the new one and in case the new one has more rows - create a column named date putting today`s date into it. Then I would get the date into the report, so that the user could see the last  date on which refreshing has resulted into an additional new row.

       I actually do not see a  way to do it in PBI…..

       I thought of processing the datasource through SQL database, writing a procedure which will perform the daily refresh of the table in question in 3 steps:

      1. Get new table from source,
      2. Compare the old and the new and in case the latter has more rows, create a date column putting todays date into it,
      3. Truncate the old table replacing values with the new

      Combined with a job to execute it daily that might get me what I want, but it will take some server capacities and it seems to be quite a tricky workaround. I just thought somebody, might have had a similar issue already and has figured out a more elegant solution….

       

      • parry2k's avatar
        parry2k
        Super User
        6 years ago

        victoriavd yes in this case you have to have to heavy lifting done at the backend, PBI is not going that for you, if you have some audit log, can be used but seems like that is not the case All it points to do the work in backend and just visualize in Power BI. I know it is not the answer you expected but that's what it is. 

         

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