Usage Scenarios

If you have implemented PBI Incremental Refresh on the Nimbus template, there could be situations where Advanced Incremental Refresh techniques may be required to manage your report deployment. Provided that you are using a Power BI premium license, you can consider exploiting third party tools and techniques for an “advanced” Incremental Refresh as mentioned in the Advanced Incremental Refresh section of the Microsoft knowledge base. 

💡Some examples where advanced Incremental Refresh techniques may be useful could be:

• Large datasets - The dataset in your tenant is very large and you hit the Power BI limitations of your deployment when doing the first refresh to fill the data archive you wish to have. In this case you either have to reduce the time range for your archive period or, provided you have a Power BI license with Premium capacity, there is the possibility to manage partitions and bootstrap initial refreshes using external tools.
  🔍If this case applies to you, read into our Use Case - Avoiding load failures with PBI Incremental Refresh.
  For further details, you can also refer to the Microsoft documentation: Prevent timeouts on initial full refresh. 
• Partition management and Model Size estimations.
• Comparing differences between versions - When there is a new feature mentioned in the latest version of the semantic model, as noted in our Nimbus BI Template Release Notes, you may want to…:
  • … check the code differences between the semantic model in the existing file and the newer version. 
  • … update the underlying semantic model with the latest changes without having to re-set the entire Incremental Refresh from scratch.

Comparing version differences with ALM Toolkit

ALM Toolkit is an open source free tool that can be used to compare the semantic model of an incrementally refreshed report in MS Power BI online and another Power BI file. This can be useful, for example, when a new Nimbus template version has been deployed and you want to see the differences and make model changes in your online file, without having to set the incremental refresh once again from scratch. 

🔍 For more information and instructions on how to use ALM toolkit, visit the ALM toolkit webpage and ALM Toolkit on MS Analysis Services GitHub. 

Partition Management and Model Size estimates with Tabular Editor

Tabular Editor is another open-source tool that lets you easily manipulate and manage measures, calculated columns, display folders, perspectives, and translations in Analysis Services Tabular and Power BI Sematic Models.

The tool can be used for changing the incremental refresh policy of a report you have already uploaded online, to avoid failures on the initial refresh as explained in our Use Case - Avoiding load failures with PBI Incremental Refresh or even to just check the model size, for example to estimate size growth if you increase the archive policy of your incremental refresh.  

Usage Examples

Exploring the model with Tabular Editor

Below are some examples of what can be viewed once Tabular Editor connects to the model. 

Viewing the model size

 You could check this information after loading a certain amount of data (for example 1 month) and use it as the starting point for projecting the growth of your file size based on the x number of times required to reach the target archive (e.g. x number of months, weeks, days, etc.). 

Viewing the refresh policy

Select the table name and expand the refresh policy section.

You can use this to change the Archive (Rolling Window Granularity and/or Periods) or the Incremental Granularity. E.g. if you discover that your report is too large and you want to reduce the load by decreasing the archive size.