Allowing clients access to private database for initial PowerBI desktop data source

[timmy]

I'm a developer and want to allow clients of our product to use their data (in a Postgres AWS RDS database) as a data source for PowerBI desktop (to later by synced to the Power BI service).

As I've come to understand, the On-Premise Gateway is only concerned with refreshing data on the Power BI Service once it has been published. It doesn't handle any initial access to data sources.

Can people share how they are allowing their clients secure access to their databases to allow them to setup their reports? I had previously simply made a copy of our database publicly accessible but this isn't a secure enough solution. My new approach is to have clients use Putty to create a SSH tunnel into our AWS network to allow them connect to the database but this is cumbersome and configuration-heavy with lots of possibility for difficulties.

I'm suprised that there isn't a more elegant solution to this issue, as it's something I imagine many people encounter.

[Anonymous]

HI @timmy,

After these steps, your users can open template files with their own connection string to generate correspond personal reports or publish to service and share to users, these users can change parameters on power bi service side to view the report with their own data.

Notice: you need to confirm different user data source has the same data structure as you created report, otherwise they will face the issue for key and cached table fields not match.

Reference links:

Create report templates for Power BI Desktop 

Deep Dive into Query Parameters and Power BI Templates 

Using the Power BI Service Parameters to change connection strings (To possibly change between Dev 

In addition, you can also consider creating an API or web service to handle request redirect issue, then you can simply get data from API instead of AWS datasource.

Regards,

Xiaoxin Sheng