Power BI Azure SQL Data IO - Best Practise

[F75]

I am using Power BI to extract data from Azure SQL. My financial application has multi year data. In have a standard (pricing tier) Azure SQL subscription, when i refresh a table in Power BI (2 + Million records are refreshed)- the Azure SQL Data IO is being consumed. I am paying for overage.

Is there a best practise on data refresh in Power BI to limit Data IO? Data will be only changed in current year/period, there is no need to refresh historic data.

Thanks. 

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi @F75,

Currently, Power BI still performs a complete refresh of the data each time it refreshes.

What you describe is incremental refresh, this feature is not available in Power BI, an idea about this issue has been submitted in this link, please vote it up.

In your scenario, you can use other data source such as on-premises SQL Server database to host historic data, then append your new data. For more details, please review the following similar thread and blog.

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Service/Question-Regarding-Data-Refresh-Frequency-and-History/td-p/...
http://www.thebiccountant.com/2016/02/09/how-to-create-a-load-history-or-load-log-in-power-query-or-...

Thanks,
Lydia Zhang