Forum Discussion
Append a table to another without deleting previous information
Hi JaviCaponte ,
When you say "randomly new data" I presume you mean it is the same data points, but for a different time period?
If so then yes, incremental refresh (IR) will just append your February data onto whatever has been accrued before it. What is retained as the 'History' partition will be based on how you set your IR up in the Service. There's also a number of other parameters/settings you can adjust that will affect what information is retained as history, at what granularity, and for how long etc. but ultimately IR will add new snapshot data onto retained historical data and store it for as long as you tell it (within reason, I believe).
I think you are correct in that you can't later download this incremental data. However, if you set up IR on a golden dataset rather than just a single report, this IR data will be available to any/all other PBI reports you want to build on it. Additionally, if you really want to be able to get the data into Excel for some reason, you can connect to the IR dataset using the 'Analyse in Excel' function in the Service and get a live connection to it from Excel.
Pete
Super UserHi JaviCaponte ,
It sounds like you want to use incremental refresh.
I'll not explain all the in's and out's as it's a fairly in-depth (not difficult though) process which is specifically tailored to your use-case, but it sounds like it will do EXACTLY what you want.
What I will say though: if you decide to do this, make sure that your PBIX file you implement it on is in it's final production state and that it can stand the test of time as, once you've switched incremental refresh on, you can't turn it off again without losing all your historical data that you've accrued to that point.
Info here:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/incremental-refresh-overview
Pete
Thanks Pete,
But what if the new data (for example: February's Sales Data) has nothing to do with the old one (January's)?
The format and columns are the same, but it is just randomly new data of information. Februarys File is just a snapshot at a time.
Will Incremental Refresh show me this new information appended to the previous one?
Thanks as always in advanced.
I think the problem as well is that I do not think Incremental Refresh allows me to download the info later
- BA_Pete
Hi JaviCaponte ,
When you say "randomly new data" I presume you mean it is the same data points, but for a different time period?
If so then yes, incremental refresh (IR) will just append your February data onto whatever has been accrued before it. What is retained as the 'History' partition will be based on how you set your IR up in the Service. There's also a number of other parameters/settings you can adjust that will affect what information is retained as history, at what granularity, and for how long etc. but ultimately IR will add new snapshot data onto retained historical data and store it for as long as you tell it (within reason, I believe).
I think you are correct in that you can't later download this incremental data. However, if you set up IR on a golden dataset rather than just a single report, this IR data will be available to any/all other PBI reports you want to build on it. Additionally, if you really want to be able to get the data into Excel for some reason, you can connect to the IR dataset using the 'Analyse in Excel' function in the Service and get a live connection to it from Excel.
Pete
Thanks Pete, I'll Accept this as a solution then. Kudos!
