Do Power BI Report Builder reports get real time data from server? (no refresh wait time)

RubySmith — Tue, 12 Jan 2021 07:50:28 GMT

Hi,

Apologies in advance - novice here. We have operational reports built in Power BI Desktop, where the data refreshes / syncs to the server to reflect updates every hour (not ideal for real time analysis).

The reports just need to be basically point in time static reports that can be intentionally re-run after updates have been made. Is this how a report built in the "PowerBI Report Builder" tool (as opposed to Power BI Desktop) would work (if data souce is our Azure database)?

My very limited understanding is that "Power BI Report Builder is optimized for working with RDL Reports in Power BI Service".

RDL reports = server reports, "RDL is an XML application primarily used with Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services" so it would pick up data directly from the server and not the "cached / local memory of Power BI that gets refreshed every hour"?

*Also a little confused with the above as you can select the database as a data source in the basic Power BI dashboard reports but it references the cached / stored in Power BI memory data that needs refreshes, not referencing the raw data itself.

I've heard of the two Power BI Dashboard workarounds DirectQuery and upgrading to the Premium service but looking for all options first.

Thanks in advance

Re: Do Power BI Report Builder reports get real time data from server? (no refresh wait time)

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Jan 2021 06:39:26 GMT

RubySmith

Two things you need to know:

Power BI Report Server do not have much relationship with PBI Service.

Power BI Report Builder is a tool for authoring paginated reports that you can publish to the Power BI service, if you do not use paginated report, Report Builder is not neccessary.

For your requirement you do not need to use Report Server and Report Builder. DirectQuery is a connection mode, the other 2 modes are Import and Live Connection. Each connection mode is used to connect different datasources. Under Live connection mode, the report will automatically refresh when the datasource is updated. For DirectQuery and Import, if you want to make report refresh when the datasources updated, you need to manually refresh the dataset and report every time.

Hope that is clear, it is depended on what datasources you are connecting.

Paul Zheng _ Community Support Team
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Do Power BI Report Builder reports get real time data from server? (no refresh wait time)

Re: Do Power BI Report Builder reports get real time data from server? (no refresh wait time)