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Microsoft Idea

Power BI

Under Review

Dataflow, load to an existing Datamart

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Mimoune Djouallah on 29 May 2022 07:39:00

Currently when you create a dataflow, it give you the option to either create a new dataflow or a new datamart, which is a great option for a new user as you get a full Online experience from Data Prep, Modelling to Final reports, and a good option to start a new standalone report


but for existing users with a bit of experience, we prefer another Workflow, give us an option to load a dataflow to an existing Datamart, we want to use a Datamart as a central Database to store a lot of tables for a specific Business Topic, Currently the only way to do it is to create a separate dataflow and load data from there, the problem is, if you have a Datamart with 100 Tables, and only one table has changed, you need to reload all the 99 tables, that's not a very good usage of PowerBI resources Neither for customers nor Microsoft.


When Loading Data from Dataflow to Datamart, we prefer those option in order of Priority.


  • Overwrite
  • Incremental refresh
  • append
  • Upsert using PK etc


This is Microsoft opportunity to redefined ETL for mass market, and blur the line between Enterprise ETL and Self service Data preparation.

Comments (4)
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Andreu fil on 19 Apr 2024 15:00:24

RE: Dataflow, load to an existing Datamart

Good information, thankssehackear.top

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Mimoune Djouallah on 09 Aug 2022 05:21:41

RE: Dataflow, load to an existing Datamart

@ Steven Fullerboth the idea is to decouple data from datamart for maximum flexibility, now if you want to refresh a table, you have to refresh the whole model, that does not work in any serious scenario

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Steven Fuller on 13 Jun 2022 20:38:30

RE: Dataflow, load to an existing Datamart

Mimoune, are you referring to previously existing Dataflows as well? or just new dataflows? Personally I think what you're suggesting would be great, especially for an existing dataflow that someone wants to use in a datamart. I'm sure I'm not the only one who already has many active dataflows that I would love to be able to work with in a datamart, but don't really want to duplicate all of them just for the datamart capabilities.

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James Fancke on 29 May 2022 08:14:22

RE: Dataflow, load to an existing Datamart

Allowing dataflows to choose their destination simplifies the story for users:a dataflow is a way to get data from source systems into a storage destination. you can pick either basic datalake storage (CSVs + manifest/typing) or richer relational database storage (Azure SQL DB).