Initial Incremental Refresh Fail

Thanks for your response GilbertQ

It takes roughly 6 hours to load on the Desktop. Thanks for confirming that uploading a large portion of the data won't actually help with the first initial refresh. So this leads me to think that Incremental Refresh is great for growing a dataset into a large one and especially for speeding up refreshes -- the key part of that word being "re" . However, Incremental Refresh must not necessarily be the right/best way to backload a very large amount of data, which is what I've been trying to do. Would you agree with this thought?

If so, then I guess my only option is to limit my historical data to an amount that will initially refresh in a reasonable amount of time. So I've got to lose some history, which is unfortunate.

What's strange maybe is why am I facing this on a dataset that's less than 200 million rows and under 4GB. Haven't larger datasets by others been setup on scheduled and/or incremental refresh?