Forum Discussion
Incremental Refresh or alternative
Without a full understanding of the ETL/Database etc. it's difficult to say, but the lastUpdate DT will only cause the data to be refreshed if that date is within the defined incremental refresh period. E.g. if your incremental period is set to 1 month, it also needs to have changed from the last cached version of that date.
With the access you have, I would probably look at simplifying the data in the database before Power BI connects. Always "As far upstream as possible..."
If you haven't read it already...
The other thing to consider, what is the performance like now, and how quickly is the data growing?
You may have a working solution for the foreseeable future. You can always make a plan to revisit later.
That's great if you have control over the backend.
Do you have a lastUpdated date?
Is it a hard or soft delete?
If soft, you can use detect data changes with a lastUpdated column.
Alternately, if the business can define a period where data will NEVER change you could use that as your incremental range but performance may not be great depending on how far back that is.
You will need to figure out how to deal with the deletes either way. Ideally it'll be a soft delete or could be captured in some way so they can be excluded on refresh.