Forum Discussion
Data Storage and Refreshing in Power BI Online
On the contrary, loading all the data at once is the most efficient approach. If you split the data by person or region, at a minimum you need a starting report for each of them (let's say 10). Then you decided to add one more slicer (you have to do it 10 times - forever). Power BI is very efficient in compression and storage. You should creat a data model with all your data (I have 60million records in one of my reports and it is 300MB and takes 25 minutes to refresh each week. Creat a set of reports with slicers for different people/ regions. Where you want to limit what they see, use the inbuilt row level security.
Users cna create there own reports, but I recommend someone create them centrally with slicers. If users want more they can create their own from there.
your access dB may or may not have data in the right structure. Regardless, power bi can handle it.
To refresh you can either refresh with Power BI desktop locally and push it to the cloud each day, or you can use the gateway to do it automatically.
Ive been around a long time, and in my opinion you won't find a better solution today, and I can almost guarantee it will be a lot better in another 6 months, then again 6 months later. This is probably going to be the subject of a blog article of mine shortly.
Hope st helps
Thank you for all of the information. Just to clarify, we would have to purchase Power BI Pro in order to use the gatway to connect, correct? I have it downloaded and set up, but when I try to add it as a datasource I'm told that I need to upgrade to Pro. I like the idea of using slicers and row level security, and we may still do this but refresh the data manually each day. It would be hard to pay $6,000 per year just to have it done automatically (we have 51 users that all need to access reports).
Community ChampionYes, you need pro licences for everyone if you use a gateway. Anothe rapproach is to purchase power Update http://xbi.com.au/Update for $500 + maintenance and use that Instead to push a local copy to the service.