Forum Discussion

Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
5 years ago

Scheduled refresh of SQL source but with R script transformstions

Hello.

 

I am exploring using PBIRS as the server to host Power BI reports, which will extract/source data from a SQL Server Database, and which will subsequently use R scripts to transform the data in various ways.

 

Per the link below, as far as I understand R scripts themselves are not a source which can have PBIRS scheduled refreshes applied to them.  As such, I'm wondering the following:

 

1.) Is there a way to work around this so that I can in fact schedule refreshes of a single R script which will hold the code for the entire ETL,

 

2.) If SQL Server Database is the source and transformations are applied using R scripts, does scheduled refresh work in this scenario?

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/report-server/data-sources#list-of-supported-authentication-methods-for-model-refresh

PBIRS
R script
Scheduled data refresh
SQL Server Database

1 Reply

  • lbendlin's avatar
    lbendlin
    Super User
    5 years ago

    Using R for ETL seems like a bad idea - it's rather slow.  You should be able to run R scripts from within Power Query (it is possible for the regular Power BI) or you could also consider running your R scripts directly on your SQL Server data source (assuming you use a new-ish version of SQL Server).