disable refresh in Desktop only

[markmsc]

This is a basic question I'm afraid, but I've been unable to put togerher the right search term to yield an answer, assuming there is one.  So here we go.

I'm obliged to use Power BI Desktop to manage a semantic model that is published to the Power BI service.  It is connected to many large tables. I have no need for the model to contain data when I am working with it in Desktop, and in fact, I don't *want* it to contain data, because the large tables overwhelm my local system resources.

I know I can go into PQE and disable refresh for indiviidual tables.  I would rather do it for all tables at once.  But I also don't want to have refresh disabled for anything in the model itself, because when I publish it, I do want the published model to refresh everything.  

Is there a way to achieve this?  Have the model in Deskop be empty, but the published version still refreshes?

Thank you.

[markmsc]

Thank you, @Greg_Deckler   and @Anonymous .  I will review your advice and see where I get!

[Anonymous]

Hi All,

Firstly,  @Greg_Deckler thank you for your solutions!

And @markmsc  according to my understanding, I want to share another method.

When using live connection, there is no need to load the data locally for operation, and when refreshing in the power bi service, the changes are extracted directly from the database without going through the power bi desktop.

What's the difference between live connections and DirectQuery? - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Hope it helps!

Best regards,
Community Support Team_ Tom Shen

If this post helps then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[Greg_Deckler]

@markmsc Couple methods of doing something like this. One would be to create the model in the Desktop and turn on Incremental refresh. Your data can remain small in Desktop but the Service will refresh the data incrementally. Normally this kind of method is coupled with using something like the ALM Toolkit to just publish modifications made instead of the entire report itself.

Another method is using Query parameters. So in the Desktop you create a parameter that allows you to grab, let's say, the last 2 years of data only. You then use deployment pipelines to automatically update that parameter where you pull all of the data.

Probably more ways to do it but those are the first 2 that I thought of.