Important: This post was written and published in 2019, and the content below may no longer represent the current capabilities of Power BI. Please consider this post to be an historical record and not a technical resource. All content on this site is the personal output of the author and not an official resource from Microsoft.

This week’s Power BIte is the first in a series of videos^[1] that present different ways to create new Power BI dataflows, and the results of each approach.

When creating a dataflow by defining new entities in Power Query Online, the final dataflow will have the following characteristics:

Let’s look at the dataflow’s model.json metadata to see some of the details.

At the top of the file we can see the mashup definition, including the query names and load settings on lines 11 through 19 and the Power Query code for all of the entities on line 22.

At the bottom of the file we can see information about the refresh and storage.^[2] Line 26 identifies the entity as a LocalEntity, which means that the entity’s data is physically stored in the current CDM folder.

Line 30 shows that the entity is fully refreshed rather than incrementally refreshed, and line 31 shows the file name where the entity data is stored. Lines 97 through 99 identify the single partition where the data for the current version of the entity is stored, including the full URI for the data file. If this entity used incremental refresh, there would be multiple partitions to match the incremental refresh policy.

If this information doesn’t all make sense just yet, please hold on. We’ll have different values for the same attributes for other dataflow creation methods, and then we can compare and contrast them.

I guarantee^[3] it will make as much sense as anything on this blog.

^[1] New videos every Monday morning!

^[2] The same information is also included starting on line 103 for the Promotions entity,  but is not pictured here.

^[3] Or your money back.