Report displaying Azure SQL Database data with real-time updates

Hi yyjp​,

both of your approaches work around the core limitation rather than solving it, Power BI reports (DirectQuery or Import) are not built for true real-time, they're pull-based on a refresh cycle, which is why you're relying on dashboard pinning or browser auto-refresh extensions.

The method actually designed for this is a Push Dataset / Streaming Dataset, and it's lighter on your database than 1-second DirectQuery polling:

• Instead of Power BI pulling from Azure SQL every second, you push data into Power BI via the REST API (or through Azure Stream Analytics / Power Automate as a middle layer reading change events from SQL).
• This updates dashboard tiles in real time (sub-second, no manual refresh needed) without hammering your database with repeated queries.
• Reports (not dashboards) still don't support true real-time, so you'd pin the relevant visuals to a dashboard, same as your current DirectQuery approach, but tile updates arrive via push instead of scheduled polling.

Key tradeoff: this requires a bit of setup (an Azure Function, Logic App, or Stream Analytics job to detect SQL changes and push them), but it fully removes the 1-second polling load from your Azure SQL Database, which your current DirectQuery method can't avoid.

If setup complexity is a concern, Fabric's newer Real-Time hub / Eventstreams is also worth a look if you're on a Fabric capacity, it's built specifically for this kind of continuous ingestion without repeated query load.