Forum Discussion
Best Option for Power BI Data Repository
There are definitely plenty of ways to store data. If you are currently building reports off of a bunch of Excel files on your local hard drive, then probably the simplest approach is to save those same Excel files to the cloud (e.g. SharePoint) instead so you don't need to worry about data gateways or converting Excel to SQL tables. Not ideal for huge amounts of data (maybe setting up intermediate Power BI dataflows would help some?) but should be fine for lighter loads.
astanfo There are a ton of options here. OneDrive would work (basically SharePoint) or an Azure SQL DB instance or Azure SQL Managed Instance would eliminate the need for a on-prem gateway. Azure blob storage or Azure file storage, cheap, doesn't require an on-prem data gateway. Tons of ways of doing it. Pros and cons, you have the basics. But, why wouldn't the other analysts just be connecting Live to your Power BI dataset? Then you don't have to worry about access to the source files.
Thank you Greg_Deckler ! Are there many additional benefits of using Azure versus a SQL db?
The problem I see with connecting to a Power BI dataset is there is not the option to view the data in a table format, you can only view the report and model. When slicing and dicing data in a multitude of ways, I think it is good to have this option so the analyst can fully understand everything they just pulled into their report. Another reason is that analysts may not want to connect to an entire Power BI dataset, but instead want to only use one table within the model. Pulling in an entire dataset (maybe 12 tables or more) would be uneccessary.