Forum Discussion
Does semantic model update skip unchanged files?
Have you looked into Incremetal refresh?
This lets you:
Indicate how far back to refreshProvide an update field and only items with a new date will refresh
Using Premium have a live connection for some data, refresh import and finally stored non updating for the oldest.
Official page:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/incremental-refresh-overview
Video guide (Guy in a Cube also made some great ones!):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH_mcS9Bv9E
Super User
Have you looked into using incremental refresh on new records or records that have changed? If this isn't feasible for some reason, I'd split the database into at least two - one for the historical data and the other one for current - and load them as separate tables to be connected using relationships. You can disable the refresh on historical tables. Note: they need to be loaded separately and not be combined in one query as that will still pull the data from the historical table upon refresh.