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jribs's avatar
jribs
Helper I
5 years ago

SAP BW, Dates as Text, and Incremental Refresh

SAP BW (non-HANA) and Incrementally Refreshing has been giving me a lot of trouble for the past few months. On a positive note it has taught quite a lot.   Here is the issue: In order to incremen...
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mahesh_powerbi's avatar
mahesh_powerbi
Frequent Visitor
4 years ago

Hi jribs ,

 

I am facing the same issue from past few weeks and desparately looking for a solution.

 

Please check this microsoft article about importing "key" along with the date column that apparently gets imported as Date. Although, the solution didn't work for me. 


Also check this post on another thread about same issue and try your luck. 

 

 

 

Please please let me know if you find a solution to perform incremental refresh or another workaround. My email ID is: [email protected]

 

I will surely post here in case I find a solution.

 

Thank you,

Mahesh

jribs's avatar
jribs
Helper I
4 years ago

Hey mahesh_powerbi ,

 

Apparently, there is configuration to be done on the SAP BW side to dictate how fields are delivered. So whatever configuration you have in the BW for Calendar Day.Calendar Day Level 01.Key has to be mimicked for Posting Date. I am not knowledgeable enough in what that change is to have an intelligent conversation about it.

 

We didn't have resources who could do this BW change, so I took a different approach:

 

  1. Manually Exported all records prior to arbitrary date (2018)
  2. Uploaded those records to Teams Sharepoint as historical record
  3. Set up SAP BW query to bring in new records (2018+)
  4. Appended the queries in Query Editor

That isn't exactly incremental refresh, but it has frozen pre-2018 while refreshing everything 2018+. If it gets to be too much and we run into memory errors, I simply move the needle to 2019 for both datasources. Hope that helps, but also hope you have the resources to help out on the BW, since that is the more robust solution.

 

Regards,

Josh

  • mahesh_powerbi's avatar
    mahesh_powerbi
    Frequent Visitor
    4 years ago

    Hi jribs ,

     

    Thanks for the response and sharing the work around. Unfortunately, I dont know the configuration of Calendar Day Key column. It was someone else's post.

     

    Regards,

    Mahesh