Forum Discussion
Best Practice for Service Accounts
Is it recommended to use a dedicated service account for OAuth authentication in Power BI datasets rather than a personal developer account?
In practice it is usually better to avoid a personal developer account for production dataset credentials.For scheduled refresh, Power BI stores and uses dataset credentials in the service, and OAuth-based refresh depends on those stored credentials remaining valid. If the underlying account is changed, disabled, or its token can no longer be refreshed, refresh can fail and require reauthentication.
4 Replies
For authoring you will need personal developer accounts to create and publish reports in the service. For refreshing and managing a service account can work well, especially if you are working with an on-prem gateway to refresh your reports. With on-prem gateways a service account can streamline/limit credentials that are loading data into production reports. It really comes down to organizational policy when it comes to database access.
In practice it is usually better to avoid a personal developer account for production dataset credentials.For scheduled refresh, Power BI stores and uses dataset credentials in the service, and OAuth-based refresh depends on those stored credentials remaining valid. If the underlying account is changed, disabled, or its token can no longer be refreshed, refresh can fail and require reauthentication.
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Thank you cengizhanarslan for your valuable response.
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