The incremental refresh feature has proven very popular and attracted much usage. We received strong feedback from customers that we should make it available with Power BI Pro licensing rather than a Premium-only feature. In fact, at time of writing this post, incremental refresh in Pro is the 2nd highest voted item on https://ideas.powerbi.com/! Well, you talked; we listened. We are pleased to announce that, in addition to incremental refresh reaching general availability, it is also now available in Pro.
Incremental refresh is a critical capability to unlock actionable insights for intelligent decision-making over very large datasets. It is a great example of how Power BI provides a simplified management experience for enterprise BI. Where traditionally (on Azure Analysis Services for example) customers would write and maintain complex code for this purpose, the incremental refresh feature allows the definition of a refresh policy using a simple dialog. The Power BI service then does the work of managing partitions for optimized data loads. Together with the large models feature, incremental refresh can enable datasets to grow to very large sizes. Refreshes are faster and more reliable, and you don’t need to reload all the historical data every time.
In addition to support in Pro, incremental refresh operations also now observe the time zone specified in the dataset settings page.
Please see this article for more details.
Finally, with the upcoming XMLA read/write feature, you will soon be able to publish new versions of a dataset without losing historical data created through incremental refresh. Enjoy!
