I'm an experienced developer who knows very little about Power BI. So we've hired some consultants to implement our Power BI screens. And I provided them with a read-only login to my SQL Server database.
It works okay, but when we complained that the data never updates, they are now telling us we should set up a VM to "assure that at the refreshing moment, the scheduled job is not going to fail. VM is always connected, so even during holidays, weekends, the data will be always refreshing."
They followed up with "If the database is on-premise, we need a gateway to connect power bi to the database. If the machine, where the gateway is installed is off, power bi can not connect to the database. So, we need a VM to assure that the gateway is always on."
But this makes zero sense to me. Our database is not on-premise if it's on the Internet and we've given them a connection string. They should be able to update the data at any time.
Can anyone tell me what I'm missing here? I'm starting to question these guys' knowledge. Is it this complicated for Power BI to automatically update its data?
Some data sources require a Data Gateway, even if you put them on the open internet. Data sources that are typically deployed on private networks, or data sources that require 3rd party drivers require the Power BI On-Prem Gateway for refresh. See the list here.
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I am new BI and working on power bi reports embedded into user application. How can I explain users about how data is secured in power bi. I am getting many questions about security. Can you kindly explain how you explained to your customers?
Thanks alot
Well,
Once you embed(Publish) a report to website, all the people who can access that website link can access the report and data.
So its a way to share Power BI report for free.
As you are using reports embeded in another application, if that application has integration with Azure then we can use Azure AD with that. Moreover, You can implement RLS, OLS and data masking in pbi, even in embeded mode.
Internally, datasets hosted in the PBI service are using Azure SQL in an encrypted mode. Even the credentials used to get data are encrypted.
If you want to explain customers, use the whitepaper of security.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/guidance/whitepaper-powerbi-security
I'v been assigned the task to research Power BI Service platform to see if it is useful for the company I'm working at. I have a Power BI Pro license and basically my goal is to create several reports and dashboards from disparate data sources such as REST APIs, mongodb, SQL Server, csv and excel files.
I would like to create the mentioned datasets directly from the Power BI service website but I see that I only can create datasets from csv or excel files. And if I select SQL Server, it asks me to download Power BI Desktop client. The other type of data sources that I need are not even mentioned.
My question is if Power BI Desktop is required to develop and configure datasets for the Power BI service, because to begin with it is a windows only application.
Yes you are. The desktop version provides the full power of the software. You can learn a TON of things from this guy on YouTube and also from these guys in a cube. I'm willing to bet you can search the questions you have & can find specific example videos that'll help you determine if this software is right your company. In my opinion, when it comes to data visualization software, it's tough to beat Power BI. That's especially true if your company is on Office 365.
As a tip, it's important to note what kind of data sources you need to communicate with. And are those sources in a cloud or on premise. That's important depending on how "live" you want your data to be.
The main use of Power BI Desktop (Windows only application) is to get the data from the sources into data model, then load it to the service. The data connections and the ability to create reports is limited compared to the service. The main goal of the service is to share the reports and collaboration.
For example there is no realtionship designer in the service to connect the imported entities. You can create a report in the desktop and load it to the service, and then create other reports from its dataset in the service.
You can create dataflows in the service to get data from flat files, and databases, but you then use Desktop to connect to them and link them together there.
This monday I installed my Power Bi gateway which is connected to my local drive (C:/). I uploaded my online PowerBi analysis on microsoft sharepoint. Everything works perfectly.
My next step is to install the gateway for my network drive because that way my PC doesn't have to run once the autorefresh is supposed to refresh. I have a problem, I can't get the gateway on my network drive. Someone else already asked this question on stack overflow but there where no answers, that's why I want to ask it again.
I can change the path of my Power Bi analysis to my network drive and I can also upload the files to app.powerbi.com, that's not the problem.
If you have questions don't bother asking.
I hope to hear from you soon.
I had 2x reports using Gateway where 1x would not connect to my work's network. The other report ok. I re-confirmed credentials and access rights and all were ok. Therefore, it was a problem with the 1x report somehow. I then gradually stripped my report down and eventually found the problem. It also used a SharePoint Excel file to obtain some data, it was having this SharePoint file along with a network data source that caused the problem. As soon as I removed the SharePoint link, everything worked ok! This is annoying because the spreadsheet was far more accessible via SharePoint. The best debug you can do is to 1) check you data source settings and ensure you're logged on to all of them, 2) strip your report back until it works, 3) create a super-basic report by grabbing one data source from your network and using a basic table to display contents.
Is there still no way for Power BI Desktop to automatically refresh data without publishing pbix to Power BI Service? Due to threat of private information leakage, we want to maintain our data only via Power BI Desktop (not using Power BI Service first). We have been looking for ways on how to work around the automatic refresh in PBI Desktop for over a day already but all pointing us to publishing pbix to Power BI Service, which will allow us to schedule the refresh after. Any feedback will be much appreciated.
Thank you!
There is no supported way to do this. The easiest workaround is to teach your users to click on Refresh button. Second easiest thing could be to use DirectQuery instead of import mode.
There are some attempts for workarounds from the community, but you should use them with caution:
PBIXRefresher and pbixrefresher-python scripts by Michal Dúbravčík
Write some code that starts opens the .pbix file in Power BI Desktop, finds its PID, then finds the port on which the child Tabular process listen and use Tabular Object Model (TOM) to refresh it
Use Power Update (paid) tool
But leaving workarounds aside, Power BI is compliant with a lot of security standards. Data leaks of data from the cloud in most (all?) of the cases will be caused by a human factors, which is also possible with on-premise data. But if it is a no-go for your organisation, then either use Power BI Server on-premise, or another reporting tool (e.g. SSRS).
There is no way to automate the refresh in PowerBI desktop. You have to manually click the refresh button. Many organisations trust PowerBI Service with their data. However, in the case that you have some serious data residence restrictions, then you can deploy PowerBI Report Server on premises and publish to this without your data leaving your network.
I need your help.
We have a plan to run "SQL DB and Web services" on AWS and need to publish the Power BI report by embedding to web service running on AWS.
Do you think it's possible scenario? IF yes, how can I achieve this?
You can't embed Power BI in a web service, so I will assume you want to embed it in a web application.
You need at least three components in such architecture - a place to store your data (assuming it will be in some kind of SQL Server), Power BI (assuming Power BI Service) and web application.
The database can be managed by your cloud provider (e.g. Amazon RDS) or "normal" instance running in a VM in the cloud. Of course, it could be something else (not SQL Server), or even be in a different cloud (e.g. Azure), or on-premise. The point is that you store your data there and use this as a data source for your reports.
The you need Power BI to create reports. Assuming that you will use Power BI Service (the online portal), you will design your reports in Power BI Desktop, getting data from your data source, and publishing these reports to Power BI Service. At this point you can view these reports in the portal using the browser. Power BI Service will render them using shared resources. For embedding and relatively heavy usage, you should buy a capacity. Think for capacities as resources (CPU, memory) dedicated only for you. They are not shared with other Power BI users. There are different licensing models and ways to buy a capacity. You can buy Power BI Premium or Azure SKUs. This FAQ tries to explain the differences, but in general A SKU means "pay what you use, stop at any moment, without any commitments", while EM SKU and P SKU are for bigger scale projects with monthly or yearly commitment. When you buy a capacity, you can assign it to a workspace containing your reports, and then they will be rendered using your own dedicated resources (which should give you better performance).
And the last part is your application (assuming web application, which you can host in Amazon Web Hosting or in VM), where you want to embed your reports. Generally speaking, there are two scenarios - "user own data" and "app own data". In the first, each of your users needs Azure AD account. Using this account, he will get access to the reports and data, as he has in the Power BI Service itself. In the second scenario, your app uses one "master" account to access the Power BI, thus your users doesn't need their own accounts in Azure AD. You can use your own authentication in your app. Embedding Power BI is quite large topic and your question isn't specific, so I will recommend to start with Embedding with Power BI article, take a look at Power BI Embedded Playground and review the samples.