Good ways of testing the incremental refresh available in the february update?

[h4tt3n]

Hello folks,

First off I'd like to thank the Power BI team for listening to their customers and making the incremental refresh available to Pro users too. This is really great! The lack of this function very nearly made our team look for another software solution.

But now, with the much-needed function in place, the next question appears: How do I test that the function is actually working the way I expect it to? What tools or methods can you recommend?

As a first test I have uploaded a proof-of-concept dummy report to our test server (Azure SKU A1) with all the updates needed for implementing incremental refresh according to the official page. For reference I also have an identical report without the incremental refresh options. Both reports access and process the same real-life usere generated data in the exact same way.

But now what? How do I measure, or test how much the former is performing better than the latter? Sorry if I am asking an obvious question, but I am still a bit new to PBI.

Cheers,

Mike

[v-xuding-msft]

Hi @h4tt3n ,

You could show the latest date in a card value and try to use a relative date slicer to show the value of this day. Or you could just see if your data in visuals is changed.

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Best Regards,

Xue Ding

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[h4tt3n]

@v-xuding-msft 

I think that may not have been entirely clear about what I am asking. I am not looking for a way to check wheter the report refreshes when I ask it to - which it does flawlessly. I am asking for a way to check wheter the incremental refresh part works, ie. whether the report only gets new data since last refresh , and not the entire dataset every time.

In the below screenshot you can see Max memory consumption of our report server (Azure A1). The spikes are generated by two reports, one with incremental refresh and one without. They update four times every 24 hours, one on uneven hours, and one on even hours. As you can see, there is no clear difference between the spikes. I would expect the spike to be smaller when the report with incremental refresh is updating, but it isn't. Actually, the biggest spikes are from the report with incremental refresh. 

I am having some doubt whether the incremental refresh function is working correctly - how do I investigate this further?

Cheers,

Mike

[h4tt3n]

@v-xuding-msft 

Thanks, I will try these out.

Best regards,

Mike