Ability for Power Query Append to Union tables without auto-refreshing them

[tommarkallen]

If there are multiple tables that use different refresh frequencies, for performance reasons, you don't want them to auto-refresh whenever you union them. Currently this is what Power Query does and you cannot disable it.

[andrewt1]

If I have multiple years' data and this feature were in place, i'd define two data sets: one for old data and one for new data where the end date of the old data set is the start date of the new data set. Then I could turn off the refresh on the old data set, and keep it on for the new data set, append those tables and have Power BI only fetch new data. I have this setup, but it doesn't seem to work (the old data is fetched along with the new data even though the source data set has data refresh disabled)

[fbcideas_migusr]

Badly need this .... basically, I want to know the reason behind why it was not implemented that way already? I agree with comment made by Andrew. I have exactly same requirement where each query bring data for a different year.. and I dont want them to refresh every day if I am appending them together in a single query

[yatesj5]

I am surprised by the lack of votes. Am I missing something? This is a feature I would love from an efficiency standpoint. I have appended data for past and current years. I no longer need or want the previous years to query the database/refresh/and go through the data transformation steps. I would like the 'old' data to now be static, and only query/refresh/transform the most recent data and append. This feels much more efficient.

[rafael3]

This would be awesome. I mean, I understand PBI refreshing TableA+B if you refresh either TableA or TableB, but when you update just TableA+B, why does it need to load everything again? And don't get me started on the preview load... why can't we limit how many lines it loads?

[sander_ten_wold]

I am upvoting this in 2023, as i still cannot create a simple Incremental Refresh in PowerQuery -> PowerBI Report Server published report, by simply using "do not refresh" . The subsequent Append in powerQuery seems to ignore/override the setting??

"According to this link, it seems that auto-refresh will always happen when using Power Query append function."