Forum Discussion
Best Practice for Service Accounts
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.
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.