"Publish" button: What is actually being sent??

[Anonymous]

I have a huge uncertainty of how the "Publish" button on Power BI Desktop application works.

If I create a report on Power BI Desktop via a local file(.csv) and then proceed to hitting "Publish":

• What exactly is being pushed to Power BI?
• If the data I am referencing is a local data file(.csv), is that data being pushed to Power BI or is it just the visualizations?
• How does this work if the reports are referencing data from SQL Server?

I would not think I would be publishing 3GBs of into to Power BI.

Thanks.

[MattAllington]

Power bi desktop ingests a full copy of the data. The connection is no longer needed (unless you want to refresh the data). The copy of the data is sent to the power bi service along with the model and the visualisations. 

There are 2 modes for Sql server.  You can use direct query mode (data stays in the server locally) or import mode (data is copied just like csv files).  

It is unlikely that you would need 3gb of data copied to a power pivot workbook. I have a 60gb sql database that loads to 300mb by the time I have loaded just the data I need and also the compression has done its job