Keep historical data in local database to speed up

Question

Without a premium licensing, is it possible to simulate an incremental refresh to speed up Power BI Desktop?

Say, we keep all the data before a certain date in a local Access database and connect to the "live" database only for data after that date? The question is how to export the historical data from one or several pbix file to Access, how can we do that?

Answer 1

Try doing it as a composite model. Load your archive data as one query using Import and your recent data as another query using Direct Query. Then you can union those to tables as a DAX calculated table and use that for your report.

If you aren't using Direct Query for recent data or you need to be refreshing your model, then I believe you can uncheck "Include in report refresh" in the query editor (right-click on the query in the Queries pane) and it won't refresh that archive table unless you specifically ask it to.