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Why does Incremental Refresh require DateTime when data contains only date?
Power BI best practices recommend separating DateTime into Date and Time columns to reduce cardinality and improve performance. However, when configuring Incremental Refresh, it forces you to use a ...
The best practice recommendation is valid for incremental refresh setups as well, guaranteeing that all time values inside a date will sit in the same partition. You can do the conversion at the last minute, via
let d = Datetime.From([Date value]) in d >= RangeStart and d < RangeEnd
Incremental Refresh expects a DateTime value that is usually pegged at midnight UTC, or a date integer. The DateTime requirement is a leftover from the OLAP cube partition days. While it is theoretically possible to specify partition boundary rules at a level lower than date (or on a totally different column) the default is that the smallest partition you can get is a daily partition (Always in UTC, mind you).