Forum Discussion
Incremental Refresh with reference and merged table for SharePoint-Files
I found the problem. Due to a pivotization in my query, an error message appeared because a column name no longer matched. I changed the code so that the column names are enforced before pivoting and are statically defined if one of these values is missing in my data source and an error message is generated as a result. It is also important that RangeStart and RangeEnd are applied to the date filter in reference tables and grouped tables and that incremental updating is set up there. Setting this up for the base table alone is not enough!
Hii LaMachina1993
Reference tables always inherit whatever filters exist in Desktop, because they are not part of the incremental-refresh pipeline. Only the source table (Table A) is historized; any reference/merged table will still apply the Desktop filters unless you remove them before publishing. The solution is to keep Table A as the only table with RangeStart/RangeEnd, and remove all manual filters from the reference tables so they can receive the full historized data that Power BI generates from Table A during refresh. Once those Desktop filters are removed, the Service will show all history correctly.
I have not applied any filters to my reference tables. Once again, for clarity. I applied RangeStart (12/03/2025) and RangeEnd (12/05/2025) to my base table (Table A). My reference tables do not contain any filters. These are filtered in PowerBi Desktop based on the RangeStart and RangeEnd definitions in the base table and the reference to them. After uploading to PowerBi Service, my base table contains all historical data. However, my reference tables still contain the filtering from 03.12.2025 to 05.12.2025 from PowerBi Desktop from the base table.
I have once again used various filter settings to check how the base and reference tables behave. In my opinion, your statement is incorrect. You also have to apply incremental loading to reference tables, as other forum posts have shown. To prove this, I chose very early and late start and end dates in Desktop. That is, January 1, 2025, to January 1, 2028. My history date should only show the logs from the last 3 days. When I upload the report to Service, only the data from the last 3 days is visible in the base table. All data is still visible in my reference table, even though no direct filter is placed here. However, when I apply incremental loading to all reference tables, I always get an error message that I don't get in Desktop. (The '<oii>km-Mileage</oii>' column does not exist in the rowset.)