Incremental refresh takes more time than full refresh in PBI service

[Tracy000]

Hi team,

One of my PBI file includes 15 SQL tables, most of them have 1K to 70K recs, only 1 table is big, it has more than 3 million recs.

This whole PBI refresh in desktop takes 5 mins, the big table takes almost of the refresh time. After published to workspace, it usually takes around 7-12 mins to refresh.

I want to setup incremental refresh for this big SQL table (which has 3 million recs) to reduce refresh time in service, and setup the incremental in desktop like this, but the truth is incremental refresh doesn't help to reduce the refresh time, it takes 12-17mins to complete refresh in PBI service.
Is it normal the incremental refresh takes more time? could you please kindly advise? thank you.

[v-nmadadi-msft]

Hi @Tracy000 

As we haven’t heard back from you, we wanted to kindly follow up to check if the solution provided by the community members for the issue worked. If our response addressed, please mark it as Accept as solution and click Yes if you found it helpful.

Thanks 

[v-nmadadi-msft]

Hi @Tracy000 

I wanted to check if you had the opportunity to review the information provided. Please feel free to contact us if you have any further questions. If our responses has addressed your query, please accept it as a solution and give a 'Kudos' so other members can easily find it.

Thank you.

[v-nmadadi-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Tracy000  ,
Thanks for reaching out to the Microsoft fabric community forum.

The first refresh after setting up incremental refresh processes the entire dataset to establish partitions. This initial load can be time-consuming. Subsequent refreshes should be faster as only new or modified data is processed.
Also try reducing the refresh period from the current three months and see if that improves the refresh performance.

Additionally for models published to workspaces assigned to Premium capacities, if you think the model will grow beyond 1 GB, you can improve refresh operation performance and ensure the model doesn't max out size limits by enabling the Large semantic model storage format setting before performing the first refresh operation in the service. To learn more, see Large semantic models in Power BI Premium - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

If you find this post helpful, please mark it as an "Accept as Solution" and consider giving a KUDOS. Feel free to reach out if you need further assistance.
Thank you

[Tracy000]

Thanks for your reply, actually the first run takes more than 30mins...

[v-nmadadi-msft]

Hi @Tracy000 ,
Can you confirm if the issue still persists after reducing the refresh period or had a chance to look into large semantic model.

If you find this post helpful, please mark it as an "Accept as Solution" and consider giving a KUDOS. Feel free to reach out if you need further assistance.
Thank you

[Tracy000]

Sorry for my late reply, actually it didn't fix my issue, after changed the refresh period from 3 months to 15 days, it didn't help to reduce the refreshing time. thanks for your suggestions.