Forecasting is an important part of most management positions. Knowing how many products will sell where and when, informs resource decisions like staffing and inventory. It is also an intuitive way to compare performance between different business units, product categories etc. For P&L owners it is an essential tool to proactively manage their margin by adapting investment levels.

Do you or your users wonder how recent the data they are seeing in Power BI is? If so, there are two new easy-to-use capabilities in Power BI that make it easier for you and your users to understand the status of the data in dashboards.

This article describes the approaches that can be used to connect Power BI to on premise data.  The impact of using the Power BI model, DirectQuery and LiveConnection are explored as well.

Some of the data sources have option both to import data as well as use live connection. But there is no easy method to change it once you already built your report. So you should rather carefully decide which method you’re going to use upfront. To make this decision right, it is good to know limitations of each method. Purpose of this blog post is to cover these limitations.