Help: confusion with on-premises

[mtgarden]

We are new to BI of any type. 

We are trying to setup a service within the organization. Using the desktop tool, the team will connect to the data warehouse, and configure the transforms and relationships and likely a portion of the measures. The team will pass the file over to the business unit who will be able to expand the reporting and so forth. 

In theory, regardless of who has the file, they will be able to access the data warehouse data through the PBIX file. (I'm assuming that their rights will be passed through the ODBC driver. Then if that user uploads to powerbi.com to share their dashboards, PowerBI.com will be able to receive the updated files, because the PBIX file would contain the appropriate connection information. 

Is that correct? Would we need to run the personal gateway on the data warehouse server? Or on another server that has access to the data warehouse? Is there a gateway that runs in a service mode with a service account? When we update our passwords, if we used the personal gateway, I'm assuming that would break the automatic updates.

Anyhow, as you can see, I'm a bit foggy on the correct setup to enable communication between on premise data and the SaaS. Can someone provide some guidance or direction?

Thank you 

[Greg_Deckler · Accepted solution]

Read this:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-refresh-data/

Then this:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-refresh-desktop-file-local-drive/

Then this:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-personal-gateway/

And maybe this one for good measure:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-refresh-desktop-file-onedrive/

Short answer is that if your data warehouse is "on-premises" then you will need a gateway. If it is a SSAS tabular model, then you have the option of the Analysis Services Connector:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-analysis-services-connector/

When running the personal gateway, the gateway runs under a particular user's credentials and it is that user that must have rights to the data source.

If you use the Analysis Services Connector and get it configured correctly, it will pass the credentials of the user from Azure to the cube so that the result set is trimmed per user.