Which approach is most appropriate to extend a dataset with data from the previous year?

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Extending a dataset with historical records means pulling in only the needed subset from the source and adding those rows to your existing table. The best approach here is to extract the records from the last two months of the previous year and append them to the data table. Extraction targets just the data you want, and appending adds those rows to the bottom of your current dataset, preserving the existing data and expanding the collection with new observations.

Joining or merging implies combining datasets based on matching keys or relationships, which can alter the structure or require alignment on fields and may duplicate or overwrite data. Parsing is about turning unstructured text into structured fields, which isn’t the aim when you’re simply adding already-structured historical records. In practice, you’d filter the source to the desired date range, then union or append those rows to your existing dataset, ensuring schema compatibility and avoiding duplicates.