Forum Discussion
Enterprise Gateway to on-premise SQL Server
->> "You've still got to click "refresh" within the browser or manually click the report link, but the dataset and/or report will always be updated with the latest data from SQL Server."
1. How does this data refresh happen? Does a message get sent from powerBI.com to the Enterprise Gateway that, in turn, contacts the SQL Server to retrieve the data?
2. If so, what is the mechanism by which the Enterprise GW is contacted by PowerBI.com?
3. Does the GW need to be accessible to the Internet so that the PowerBi.com can make requests to it?
Sorry for the confusion... thanks for any assitance
Thank you
Mike
The Service Bus documentation helped my understanding of this. It's the bridge between powerbi.com and SQL Server and is the mechanism you're asking about. The Gateway contacts the Service Bus, which looks for messages/requests queued by PowerBI.com. That's the one-way, outbound communication mechanism in this case. If there are messages in the Service Bus queue, the gateway retrieves, SQL Server processes, and then sends the response back to the GW and through the Service Bus and thus back to Power BI for the visual.
Locally installed GW needs to get out to the internet to contact the Service Bus. If it's not residing on your SQL Server, then it should be installed on a server that can make outbound internet requests, as well as query the on-prem SQL data. There are ports listed in that in-depth doc. There's some other documentation about the port priority, too.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-bus-fundamentals-hybrid-solutions/