The Specific Workflow: This request is about the "Publish" workflow from the Power BI Desktop application when a developer overwrites an existing dataset in the Power BI Service. The Business Goal for Enterprise Governance: As analytics leaders, we work to enforce strong governance by using secure, non-personal identities (Service Principals) for data source credentials. This is a best practice for ensuring security, compliance (e.g., SOX), and operational stability in our finance analytics environment. The Current Challenge: The current behavior in this specific workflow creates a significant challenge for this governance model. When a developer clicks "Publish" from Power BI Desktop to update an existing dataset, the service: Assigns dataset ownership to the human "publisher" (the user logged into Power BI Desktop). This ownership change often leads to the invalidation of the existing data source credentials, even if they were correctly configured to use a Service Principal. This then requires the developer to manually go to the Service, "take over" the dataset, and re-enter credentials. The Impact on Enterprise Adoption: This behavior creates friction for teams trying to follow best practices: Hinders Automation: A single manual publish from Desktop can disrupt scheduled refresh chains that rely on the Service Principal, causing data non aggiornati. Creates Compliance Friction: It inadvertently encourages developers to use their personal credentials (which are not invalidated on publish), simply to avoid this issue. This undermines the goal of using secure, governed Service Principals. Adds Operational Overhead: It adds a manual, error-prone step to what should be a simple update process. Suggested Enhancement: We would welcome a mechanism to decouple the Power BI Desktop publisher from the ownership of the data source credentials. Ideally, when a user clicks "Publish" from Power BI Desktop to an existing dataset, the service should: Detect that functional credentials (especially for a Service Principal) are already set. Preserve these existing credentials by default, allowing them to remain active. The publisher's identity should not automatically override the credential ownership. The Service Principal should remain the owner of its credentials. This enhancement would be a major step forward in aligning the core Power BI Desktop workflow with the enterprise-grade security and governance practices that Microsoft also champions.
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