What is incremental refresh and how does it improve performance?

< 1 min read

Incremental refresh means refreshing only new or changed data instead of the entire dataset.
In one project, our sales table had 5 years of data, but only the last 7 days were refreshed daily.
Historical data remained unchanged and was not reprocessed each time.
This significantly reduced refresh duration in Power BI Service.
It also reduced load on the source database during refresh cycles.
Memory and processing consumption were optimized.
It is especially useful for large fact tables with continuous data growth.
Overall, incremental refresh improves scalability, performance, and system efficiency.

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