Create Monthly Snapshots txt files from multiple sources

[kohldorf]

Dear community,

Im quite new with Power bi, and I wanted to ask you if its possible in Power Query to extract data from a few sources and this outcome, create monthly snapshot, apending them in one file with all these snapshots or create one file per snapshot. How could I do this?

Thank to all of you!

[edhans]

@kohldorf you can look at Chris Webb's method here, but as @Greg_Deckler said, this is kinda ugly. I would not recommend generally putting this into production. Power BI is not designed to create snapshots, and this Incremental Refresh hack is, well, a bit of a hack. 😁 It is a very cool article and interesting. If you republish though you wind up whacking your earlier data. then you get into using the ALM Toolkit to preserve partitions in the service holding old data, etc.

Your best bet is to use a front end process to have two sources of data - current and previous. Then report on those differences in Power BI.

[Greg_Deckler]

@kohldorf - Snapshots like what I think you are talking about are really difficult in Power BI. I assume you want to have a table that saves the history of each data refresh? That's really, really manually intensive. You basically have to create a query per load to create a new table in the data model, then disable refresh, copy query to a new query, rinse and repeat. It's ugly.

Maybe @ImkeF or @edhans have a trick up their sleeves.