Microsoft has announced the release of Power BI Desktop: February 2020 and you can read all about it here:
I am very happy about incremental refresh, which is now generally available and is now supported for Power BI Pro licensing, meaning it is no longer a Premium only feature!
Read all about that here:
This is extremely important for all SMB companies who for example are using Dynamics 365 Business Central as a data source for Power BI, because with a Power BI Pro license you can now also enjoy the incremental refresh capabilities, so you can increase the speed of refreshes and limit the amount of data that needs to be refreshed and so also make your Power BI report refreshes a lot faster, limiting the performance impact on Dynamics 365 Business Central.
Then the bug I mentioned in the comments of this blog post:
How Do I: Create a multi-company Power BI report with the Business Central connector?
should now also be fixed for Business Central. I have not tested it completely yet but my first indications are that it works now…
Last but not least I’m also happy with the preview of the Hierarchical slicer:
This is something you almost can not live without when working with hierarchies in Power BI.
Here’s the complete list of new features in Power BI Desktop February:
- Funnel and pyramid chart by xViz
- OEE Dashboard by 3AG Systems
- Organization chart by MAQ Software
- Updates to Zebra BI tables and charts
- MicroStrategy connector is now generally available
- FHIR connector is now generally available
- Factset connector
- TIBCO connector
- Jamf Pro connector
- Asana connector
Hi,
the only problem here is that this is not true for NAV BC on prem I think, is this correct?
Thank you
Andy
Why not? It’s a feature in PBI Desktop, valid for non composit models, which means using only 1 data-source.
I mean NAV OData Web Services. At least this was told to me…
Based on this document (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-premium-incremental-refresh#configure-incremental-refresh), IF you are not using composite models, data sources do not support SQL queries like flat files, blobs, web, and OData feeds typically do not support query folding.
In cases where the filter is not supported by the data-source back-end, it cannot be pushed down. In such cases, the mashup engine compensates and applies the filter locally, which may require retrieving the full data-set from the data source.
This can cause incremental refresh to be very slow, and the process can run out of resources either in the Power BI service or in the on-premises data gateway if used.
If unable to verify, a warning is displayed in the incremental refresh dialog when defining the incremental refresh policy. SQL based data sources such as SQL, Oracle, and Teradata can rely on this warning. Other data sources may be unable to verify without tracing queries. If Power BI Desktop is unable to confirm, the warning is displayed.
The easy way is to set a small incremental range and try to do a incremental refresh, if it supports Query Folding, it should take much less time than full-size refresh.
But test carefully, such as limiting the total rows, because the process may run out of resources either in the Power BI service or in the on-premises data gateway if it does not support Query Folder.
I watched this event yesterday and there the clearly said Incremental Refresh for NAV BC on prem is not supported…
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/it-it/blog/exclusive-live-community-event-3-ask-arun-anything/
I was unable to attend this event. If they said it’s not supported, them it’s probably not. But do they mean ODATA is not supported, or the BC-OnPrem-Connector, or ODATA in common. If that’s the case, going directly to the SQL database is possible On Prem that that should support incremental refresh, right?
Imho I think that the technique proposed here might also be a good alternative:
https://thinkaboutit.be/2020/02/how-do-i-implement-an-incremental-refresh-in-power-bi-free-or-pro/
Split the tables in the Power Query editor, work with the “include in report refresh” property and then join the tables after import, in DAX.
You don’t need to do this for all tables, only the very big ones, like ledgers.
I think we should have incremental refresh for Power BI dataflows in Pro. But also for this the said it is not in scope for the moment. Of course going to the SQL db directly is possible but this is nothing new or specific to NAV. I wonder if maybe using Azure Data Factory and Azure Data Flows with incremental refresh may be a good and not to expensive approach.