Incremental Refresh for Snowflake as a data source in Power BI

[azadthakur]

Hi Team, I am using snowflake views as a source in my Power BI report. I can see that view native query option in Power query is disabled for me. I tried to implement incremental refresh in my report but it is not working.  I dont see any error also throughout the process however i can't see the changed data in my dataset. I am not sure if incremental refresh functionality will work for disabled query folding or I am doing some mistake. 

I have heard somewhere that Snowflake data source is not supporting query folding hence Incremental refresh. Please help us in clarifying this.

Regards,

Azad

[cpwebb]

No, that is not correct. If "View Native Query" is greyed out it just means you can't see the SQL queries generated by Power BI. Query folding could still be happening and you could still be able to use incremental refresh.

[azadthakur]

I thought if the option in Power Query for "View Native Query" is greyed out then we can't implement incremental refresh in semantic dataset in Power BI.

[cpwebb]

I'm a bit confused by this answer. If you're connecting to Snowflake from Power BI you are going to use the built-in Snowflake connector, and as I said you can use incremental refresh with that. The only problem is that you cannot use the "View Native Query" feature to know if query folding is happening, even though it *will* be happening behind the scenes.

[azadthakur]

Thanks Chris @cpwebb , It means we can't implement incremental refresh using snowflake as a data source in Power BI. we have to use a snowflake connector to acheive this.

[cpwebb]

The Snowflake connector does support query folding and you can do incremental refresh on Snowflake. The problem is that for some connectors, such as Snowflake, the "View Native Query" option does not work so you can't see the SQL queries Power BI generates in Power BI Desktop. That doesn't mean query folding isn't happening. 

Apart from looking at the SQL queries generated in the Snowflake portal can also use Profiler and the Execute Source Query event that I blogged about here https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2024/09/15/another-way-to-get-the-sql-generated-by-power-bi-directquery... to see the actual SQL queries generated by Power BI Desktop.