Forum Discussion

Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
9 years ago

Power BI Embedded connected to local SQL Server instead of SQL Database Azure?

Hi there,

 

I am looking into ways to most efficiently provide our customer data to those customers and we are focusing on PowerBI. However, it would be too much of a hassle to have our customers sign up for a PowerBI.com account so they can see reports in the cloud.

 

The next option would be to make use of Power BI Embedded, but from what I am reading in the documentation it seems that the only way to connect your report to a (live) database would be via a populated SQL Database on Azure. Is it possible to use Power BI Embedded in combination with our local SQL Server, just like we are now using the On-premises Data Gateway?

 

And if not, what other ways would there be to use PowerBI to present our customers with their own data in interactive charts/reports?

6 Replies

  • Greg_Deckler's avatar
    Greg_Deckler
    Community Champion

    If you do not need RLS then you could use the "Publish to Web" option, not the most secure, but simple.

    • Anonymous's avatar
      Anonymous
      Not applicable

      hi smoupre, thanks for your prompt response. 

      We do require authentication so Publish to Web wouldn't work unfortunately.

      • Greg_Deckler's avatar
        Greg_Deckler
        Community Champion

        You do have the option of using something like Pyramid Analytics Server to publish your Desktop reports to locally. Similar functionality is on the roadmap for SQL Server Reporting Services.

  • Eric_Zhang's avatar
    Eric_Zhang
    Microsoft Employee

    Anonymous

    So far, there's no gateway or refresh feature in Power BI Embedded, you can vote this idea up.

    As a workaround using Power BI, you can either choose

    1. re-fresh and re-import the pbix 
    2. Load the data from on-premises SQL Server to Azure SQL database via a regular ETL process, import a pbix in DirectQuery mode then.

     

    • Anonymous's avatar
      Anonymous
      Not applicable

      Hi ,thanks for your suggestion, have upvoted the idea!