Forum Discussion
Power BI Desktop With Azure VM SQL DB Data On One Drive Requires Gateway?
PaulBFelix The difference in what "online" means is this. If you are using a VM hosted in the cloud, this is an Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) and is treated as on-prem. If you are connecting to Azure SQL Database or Azure SQL datawarehouse these are Platform as a service (Paas) offerings and are considered "online". there are only certain situations that are completely dependent on what your datasource is where a gateway is not/is not required for powerpivot, and if you are connecting to a VM in an Iaas setup I would assume that would still require a gateway.
Here is a long list of scenerio's describing when a gateway is needed.
https://support.powerbi.com/knowledgebase/articles/474669-data-refresh-in-power-bi
Thanks Anonymous. Your explanation makes sense, but there are a couple things that don't add up. Please let me know if you happen to know what is going on with these two scenarios.
1. ashishrj post linked below describes this scenario working intermitently.
http://community.powerbi.com/t5/Service/SQL-Server-in-Azure-AM-requires-Gateway/m-p/8119#M3615
2. PowerPivot with an Azure VM SQL Server data source refreshes without the need for a gateway. I have this scenario working today and can verify that the refresh request are hitting the source database with is in an Azure VM running SQL Server.
Thank you in advance for taking the time to reply.
PaulBFelix valid points, both. The only thing I can come up with is that a file on OneDrive behaves as an online source in itself and thus doesn't need the gateway. The reference that the support site had to datasources was updated, and no longer includes the "online" and "offline" datasources. Obviously, there is much confusion around this area (including me). I'm going to try to raise visibility on this by including a couple admins to see if we can get a better answer to the "Online vs. Offline" discussion especially as it relates to the scenerio's found here maybe that will help shed some light on things.
Sandy, MiguelMartinez and not an admin, but GuyInACube cuz he's awesome - could anyone point us to a missed blog or provide some clarfication around this? - Thanks in advance.
Here's a bit of info that makes this even more interesting. I can refresh a dataset linked to an Excel PowerPivot model saved to OneDrive which sources data from a server running SQL Server outside of Azure without a gateway. I totaly didn't expect that to work without a gateway, but it definately works. I can trace the request coming from Power BI when I initiate a data refresh.
I guess PowerPivot data models for whatever reason do not require a gateway. They use the SQL native client provider.