Forum Discussion

Narukkp's avatar
Narukkp
Helper V
6 years ago
Solved

Updated record behavior in data flow incremental refresh

Hi Team,

 

I have a doubt on Power bi Dataflow incremental refresh, If we enable the incremental refresh on dataflow how it will handle the updated records i.e. if suppose I have one employee and his designation has software engineer and after some days he got promoted to senior software engineer, now dataflow will delete the existing record and insert the new record or updated the existing employee record with updated designation ?

 

Why I have got the doubt  here  we do not have any primary key concept and having only dates filed, so that how dataflow will understand the records is either updated record or inserted record ?

Need Help
  • v-lionel-msft's avatar
    v-lionel-msft
    6 years ago

    Hi Narukkp ,

     

    For the existing record, the refresh process will update it, not delete it and add a new record at the end of the table.

     

    Best regards,
    Lionel Chen

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

5 Replies

  • lbendlin's avatar
    lbendlin
    Super User
    6 years ago

    Incremental refresh does not handle late updates well. It is designed for data that is immutable after being written.

     

    Until the service supports  full refresh requests of incremental data sources your only remedy at the moment is to initiate a refresh from the desktop which will in turn force a full first refresh of the incremental data source.

  • v-lionel-msft's avatar
    v-lionel-msft
    Community Support
    6 years ago

    Hi Narukkp ,

     

    The refresh mechanism in Power BI just returns the fact data of the data source or the query results to the dataset in the .pbix file. Whether the data is updated or inserted depends on the data table of the data source.

    The refresh strategy is just a mover between the data source and the dataset. This process of moving data is similar to the copy + overlay method.

     

    Best regards,
    Lionel Chen

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

     

    • Narukkp's avatar
      Narukkp
      Helper V
      6 years ago

      Hi,
      v-lionel-msft  thank you for response but here my ask is internally power bi how it will do  i mean for existing record it will delete and insert the new record or just update the existing record ?

      • v-lionel-msft's avatar
        v-lionel-msft
        Community Support
        6 years ago

        Hi Narukkp ,

         

        For the existing record, the refresh process will update it, not delete it and add a new record at the end of the table.

         

        Best regards,
        Lionel Chen

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