Hi Power BI Community,I’m facing an issue with refresh performance in my Power BI report due to a large historical dataset. I’ve tried the Hot & Cold Data approach, but the historical table is still being queried during refresh, even though it’s marked as "not included in report refresh." My setup:Historical Table (COLD): ~200 million rows, 93 columns, stored in an SQL database.Enable Load: EnabledInclude in Report Refresh: DisabledCurrent Table (HOT): ~17 million rows, but growing every month.Enable Load: EnabledInclude in Report Refresh: EnabledFinal Table (APPEND): Combining both tables in Power Query using Table.Combine({Historical, Current}).The issue:Even though Historical is excluded from refresh, Power BI still queries it when updating the final appended table.The Incremental Refresh approach is not feasible due to file size constraints and the number of columns (93).The SQL queries are simple SELECT statements, but they take too long due to the large data volume.The goal is to only refresh the Current table while keeping the Historical table static in the model.What I’ve tried so far:Disabled refresh for Historical – but Power BI still queries it during Append.Table.Buffer() – didn’t work, as Power BI still re-executes the SQL query.Using Dataflows – not an option at the moment.DirectQuery for Historical – makes queries slower due to large data volume.My Question:1 - How can I append the Current and Historical tables while ensuring that Power BI does NOT re-query the Historical data during refresh?2 - Is there a way to store the Historical table in the model without it being queried every time the Current table refreshes?Any advice or workarounds would be greatly appreciated!

Hi everyone!I wanted to share how I finally resolved the issue I posted about earlier regarding excluding a large historical table from refresh in Power BI.🧩 The problem recap:We had a large fact table (~200M rows, 93 columns), and incremental refresh failed during full dataset refresh due to timeout and memory limits – partitions weren’t being created.We attempted a Hot & Cold Data approach by splitting into historical and current tables in Power Query and appending them, but even with “Include in refresh” disabled for historical, Power BI still queried it during refresh.Using DAX UNION to combine both tables increased dataset size and hurt performance due to additional in-memory tables and complex measures.✅ What worked:We switched to custom partitioning using Tabular Editor and SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS).I created one partition per year manually and gradually loaded data year by year.This approach allowed us to:Successfully configure incremental refresh.Avoid timeouts.Reduce memory pressure during refresh.🚀 Bonus:Once all partitions were added and processed, incremental refresh ran smoothly.This method avoided unnecessary reloading of historical data during refresh and ensured performance remained stable.I hope this helps someone facing a similar challenge. Feel free to ask if you’d like more technical details! 😊