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Best Option for Power BI Data Repository
The current Finance role that I am in involves standardizing reports for a wide audience to use. I have developed multiple Power BI reports that others are using, and I want to have a 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 Azure blob or file storage is going to be like exponentially cheaper than using SQL to store your data. Plus, if you already have the data in CSV or workbook files, you can just dump them into Azure storage versus any kind of import process for SQL.