Newbie Question - Get Data from SQL Server

[ABerndt]

I am new to BI (and to the company I am now working at), but not new to SQL Server.  I'd like to start using BI to recreate many of my reports that were previously in Crystal and Excel.  I've connected to my SQL Server and loaded the table I want to work with.  I have a series of columns that are calculations of the existing database columns.  When I add these columns to my BI file, is there any way that the data would be written back to the SQL Server database?  I do not want that to happen.  I apologize in advance for my "newbie" question but I don't want to mess up any of the database tables while I teach myself BI.

[Eric_Zhang · Accepted solution]

---

@ABerndt wrote:

I am new to BI (and to the company I am now working at), but not new to SQL Server.  I'd like to start using BI to recreate many of my reports that were previously in Crystal and Excel.  I've connected to my SQL Server and loaded the table I want to work with.  I have a series of columns that are calculations of the existing database columns.  When I add these columns to my BI file, is there any way that the data would be written back to the SQL Server database?  I do not want that to happen.  I apologize in advance for my "newbie" question but I don't want to mess up any of the database tables while I teach myself BI.

---

You never have to worry about "writing back" tp SQL Server. You'll find that Power BI underlying sends "SELECT" statements to your database, when monitoring from SQL Server profiler. Not yet have a completed test, for more ensurance, but I do believe that a SQL Server login(user/pwd) with read-only pression is suffient when connecting to SQL Server.

[ABerndt]

Thank you for the explanation!  I appreciate it.

[dexterz]

you use sql server,best way is create model in sql server analysis services tabular

[CahabaData]

You are probably better establishing Views in SQL Server and linking PBI to them - rather than tables.  This way you can better manage the data volume involved both in column count and row count.

[ABerndt]

That is a very good suggestion.  I will try to utilize views more.  I appreciate your help.

[Anonymous]

Nope, you are fine.   writing back to SQL would be awesome in some cases, but it is super not supported.... so no worries.

[ABerndt]

Thank you for the clarification.  I really appreciate the fact that you took my first question posted to this forum seriously.  I look forward to asking more productive questions in the future!