topic Re: 'Previous Version' Table on API Refresh in Developer

'Previous Version' Table on API Refresh

CLeDane — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 22:25:06 GMT

I manage a Power BI tool that is linked to my company's CRM database which tracks and forecasts potential business identified by managers. I have this report scheduled to refresh every week and automatically distribute. I would like to create a view that shows the difference between our forecasted numbers since the last refresh.

Is there a way to program Power BI to clone the current data into, say, a "previous version" table everytime the report is refreshed? Then I could use measures to find the differences I want to report from those two tables (the newly refreshed data, and the previous version data)?

I have a manual workaround, but if this could be automated it would make me look really cool 🙂

Re: 'Previous Version' Table on API Refresh

lbendlin — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 22:32:41 GMT

Power BI doesn't have that. Nor should it (in my opinion) - I think it is better to do that versioning further upstream.

Ideally you don't want to do snpashots. Better if you can record just the changes between snapshots (which would require a unique opportunity ID). Much, much better if you could actually do this event based, ie record all changes to your data as they happen.

Snapshots are plagued by the Nyquist-Shannon distance. Event based records are not.

Not sure what your CRM system is, but Salesforce.com (for example) has event based record keeping baked in.

Re: 'Previous Version' Table on API Refresh

CLeDane — Thu, 11 Jun 2020 22:44:12 GMT

The CRM system is Dynamics. Thanks for the reply, I expected as much.