Partitions of Incremental Refresh Deleted When Adding New Columns Using ALM Toolkit

Hi VanThuan 

When you add new columns to a table with incremental refresh, Power BI sees it as a structural change. That forces the whole table to be rebuilt, so all partitions get dropped and your historical data is lost. ALM Toolkit’s “retain partitions” option only works for things like measures or metadata, not for schema changes.

If you want to keep your old partitions, here are some options:

• Add the column directly in the Service model using XMLA scripting and then only process the new partition.

• Back up your partitions with Tabular Editor/SSMS, make the schema change, and then restore them.

• Or, if that’s too complex, plan for a one-time full refresh after the change.

In short: adding columns always resets partitions, so you need either scripting or a backup/restore approach if you want to keep historical data.