What is incremental loading?

Incremental loading is the process of updating data where only new or changed records since the last load are loaded, rather than the entire dataset.

This allows:

• Reducing load time and resource consumption.
• Minimizing network and storage system load.
• Enabling more frequent data updates without excessive costs.

For example, in an ETL process, incremental loading can be used to select only those rows from a database that have been added or changed since the last load, using timestamps or change identifiers.