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CarlsBerg999's avatar
CarlsBerg999
Helper V
5 years ago
Solved

Designing a reporting structure

Hi,   I'm trying to visualize the "big picture" of how the data flows to a report or a dashboard in Power BI Service from different sources. I have three categories of data sources:   SAP ByD (OD...
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  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    5 years ago

    hi CarlsBerg999 - yes, as mentioned by AllisonKennedy  OneDrive is supposed to keep your data in sync every hour; you need to only setup a gateway connection if you are trying to sync with on-premises data sources ( database server within your network, local files on your computer etc. ) 

     

    Also once you have published the report to the service you can delete the local copy of the report as it is no longer linked to the file on service - the data model & reports are uploaded to service.

     

    You can always download your data model & report from the service as seen below:

     

    Please mark the post as a solution and provide a 👍 if my comment helped with solving your issue. Thanks!

CarlsBerg999's avatar
CarlsBerg999
Helper V
5 years ago

Hi, Thank you for the links, they were helpful! 

 

I'm still wondering two things: 

Scenario: I build a report on Power BI Desktop. The repport is based on data sources (xlsx, csv) that I saved to a OneDrive folder. I publish the report on Power BI Service. 

Question: Can Power BI Service automatically refresh data from the OneDrive folder without setting up gateway?

Question: If i delete the Power BI Desktop file, what happens to the report i published in Power BI Service? 

AllisonKennedy's avatar
AllisonKennedy
Community Champion
5 years ago
You have a couple of options - if you save the desktop file into onedrive too, it will sync automatically the changes, as explained here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/connect-data/refresh-desktop-file-onedrive

Otherwise, if you publish to Power BI Service, the refresh will be scheduled from dataset - you can't do scheduled refresh from OneDrive because it syncs automatically I believe, but you also don't need a gateway. Changes are supposed to show up in the Power BI service within an hour. I recommend you test it with your data though, as it depends what other sources you have involved.

I would recommend saving the Power BI desktop file in OneDrive too, but I guess technically you can delete it. When you publish a report to Power BI service, the entire dataset and all transformations are stored in the service, so don't rely on the desktop model anymore.

Please do test though, as I personally use SharePoint or gateway for my reporting, so don't have much hands on experience with OneDrive and was helping another person in this forum with some troubleshooting with OneDrive sync and don't recall what the exact problem was.

This is all OneDrive for Business too as a note.