Skip to main content
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Enhance your career with this limited time 50% discount on Fabric and Power BI exams. Ends August 31st. Request your voucher.

Reply
Mr_Glister
Advocate II
Advocate II

Split and append table to reduce data load?

Hi,

I'm loading sales data from a SQL server. 

My sales data goes over many years but there is no need to load all the data every time with each refresh.

 

I thought I would duplicate my original sales table, filtering one only for the years >2017 and then renaming this one Sales_historic and disable "include in data refresh".

Final step then to append the two tables again, leaving me with the same table as I orginially had but only a small part of it reloads on refresh.

Would that work? I'm asking because I tried and it looks like it's still loading as many rows as before...

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION
Greg_Deckler
Community Champion
Community Champion

No, that won't work that way. What you are doing just prevents having duplicate rows in two different tables (if you never load the first query that is). Essentially, the Append statement is still going to execute the query you specify for your historic data. What I would suggest is that you have your two queries. Load the first and second queries. Then disable Load for your first query (historic). Then, use the UNION function in DAX to create a New Table that UNION's your two tables together. In this way, you will only get updates when you refresh data but you will have a single table that appends both together.



Follow on LinkedIn
@ me in replies or I'll lose your thread!!!
Instead of a Kudo, please vote for this idea
Become an expert!: Enterprise DNA
External Tools: MSHGQM
YouTube Channel!: Microsoft Hates Greg
Latest book!:
DAX For Humans

DAX is easy, CALCULATE makes DAX hard...

View solution in original post

3 REPLIES 3
v-jiascu-msft
Microsoft Employee
Microsoft Employee

Hi @Mr_Glister,

 

Please vote up this idea. Unfortunately, "include in data refresh" only works in the Desktop. I have tested it. I also tried to switch the refreshing using R code. But failed.

 

Best Regards,

Dale

Community Support Team _ Dale
If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.
Greg_Deckler
Community Champion
Community Champion

No, that won't work that way. What you are doing just prevents having duplicate rows in two different tables (if you never load the first query that is). Essentially, the Append statement is still going to execute the query you specify for your historic data. What I would suggest is that you have your two queries. Load the first and second queries. Then disable Load for your first query (historic). Then, use the UNION function in DAX to create a New Table that UNION's your two tables together. In this way, you will only get updates when you refresh data but you will have a single table that appends both together.



Follow on LinkedIn
@ me in replies or I'll lose your thread!!!
Instead of a Kudo, please vote for this idea
Become an expert!: Enterprise DNA
External Tools: MSHGQM
YouTube Channel!: Microsoft Hates Greg
Latest book!:
DAX For Humans

DAX is easy, CALCULATE makes DAX hard...

I am trying to apply your solution, but there is a step unclear to me; if I disable the load of the first query, the new table generated with DAX UNION will not recognize the first table and fail. What am I doing wrong?

Helpful resources

Announcements
July 2025 community update carousel

Fabric Community Update - July 2025

Find out what's new and trending in the Fabric community.

July PBI25 Carousel

Power BI Monthly Update - July 2025

Check out the July 2025 Power BI update to learn about new features.