Assist and general question on "Enable load" and "Include in report refresh"

[EaglesTony]

hi,

  I have a report that uses the following tables to report the data:

1) FinalTable

2) FeatureWithParent

3) MergeFinal

  I have other tables that have data that are merged into some of these tables.

  For example, I have a table called MergeStage that is left joined into MergeFinal (thus MergeStage could have new data on a refresh).

  My question is for the tables, for "MergeStage", would i have this as just "Enable Load" and not "Include in report refresh" ?

  For the 3 tables mentioned above, would I have tgese with both "Enable Load" and "Include in report refresh", since the data from these 3 tables are used on the report ?

[v-tangjie-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @EaglesTony ,

First of all, thank you lbendlin  for the quick reply. Did the reply help you solve your problem? If so, please mark it as a solution. If not, you can see the following:

 "Enable Load" means that the table's data will be loaded into the Power BI model. If you uncheck this option, the table will still be available in the Power Query Editor, but its data will not be present in the model, and you won't be able to use it in your reports.

 "Include in report refresh" means that when you refresh your report, Power BI will attempt to get the latest data for this table. If you uncheck this, the data for that table won't be updated during a refresh; it will remain as it was when you last loaded it.

1) If a new record is added to "MergeStage" and you want it to be reflected in "MergeFinal" and consequently in your report, you need to have "Include in report refresh" checked for "MergeStage". If it's not checked, the new data from "MergeStage" won't be pulled in during the refresh, and "MergeFinal" won't include the new record from "MergeStage" in its refreshed data. "Enable Load" alone is not sufficient for the new data to be included in the refresh process; it only ensures that the data is loaded into the model.

2) If "Include in report refresh" is unchecked for all tables, then when you refresh the report, Power BI will not attempt to retrieve the latest data for any of the tables. This means that the report will indeed contain "stale" data – it will only display the data as it was at the time of the last refresh when "Include in report refresh" was enabled. To have up-to-date data in your report, "Include in report refresh" should be checked for all tables that receive new or updated data that you want to be reflected in the report.

Best Regards,

Neeko Tang

If this post  helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution  to help the other members find it more quickly. 

[lbendlin]

The only thing you can control is "Enable Load"  - ie making the data available in Power BI /DAX.  The "don't include in refresh"  setting is ignored in case your loaded tables depend on the others (check the lineage view)

The (somewhat sparse) official documentation is here: Managing query refresh - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

There's a lot (A LOT) more to this topic, including the cache sizes etc.

[EaglesTony]

1) I guess my question then is, if a new record is added to the "MergeStage", which is then used in "MergeFinal", which is used on the report, if I have the "MergeStage" only set to "Enable load" and not "Include in report refresh", it will still make it onto the report, since this new record will be put on "MergeFinal", since this table is set to "Include in report refresh" ?

2) If I had ALL tables have the "Include in report refresh" unchecked, what will happen on the report, will it contain "stale" data ?

[lbendlin]

1) try it out

2) that's where the cache aspect comes into play. You may not have any stale data to fall back onto.