Incremental Refresh without Last Modified Date

[karun_r]

I have a dataset that is kind of huge, the file is around 4 GB at this point and there is nothing I can do about it. 

This model has a table that is pulling data for about like two fiscal quarters at customer level for each day. And the datasource for this table doesn't have a LastModifiedDate column indicating if a row has been updated. And I don't have the guarantee that the data in the original source for a random day would not be updated today/tomorrow etc. 

So I don't have a way to figure out which row has been modified. So I suppose Incremental Refresh is out of the question. Is there any clever way to reduce the refresh times for this dataset? It takes around 10-15 mins to refresh the table each time. And how common is having a PBI report with size of around 2+ GB ? Should I be looking for some alternative approach like building a tabular model on a different server and just pulling the measures into the report ? Or is it okay to have this big dataset on the .pbix file ?

[Anuradha]

It depends on the infrastruction and license.

Power BI supports Max of 1 GB (.pbix).
Power BI Premium supports (.pbix) files that are up to 10 GB in size.

However the capacity of the desktop version will depend on your infrastructure limitations.

Following blogs might give you more insight on the file size limitations:
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-service-may-update-file-size-increase-to-1-gb/
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-premium-large-datasets

[karun_r]

I am not actually concerned on the limitations. I just wanted to know how common it is to have models of that size in general use cases. 

[v-yuta-msft]

Hi karun_r,

The datasize of your report depends on your specific. senario. If you have resolved your issue, could you please mark the answer above to finish this thread?

Regards,

Jimmy Tao