Unable to schedule refresh in Power BI Report Server with BigQuery as data source

[Anonymous]

When I am trying to schedule refresh in Power BI Report Server I am facing this issue

"Scheduled Data Refresh is not available for reports. The report does not have any external data connections defined or is using an unsupported data source. Learn more" 

My data source is BigQuery and I have created this report in the latest version of Power BI Desktop before uploading the same in Power BI Report Server. Even the Data Sources section of Manage report is disabled so I am not able to authenticate to Data Sources.

Can some one please help me in resolving this issue. Thanks.

[cosm]

Hi @d_gosbell .

I experience the same issue. In this case Azure Devops is used as data source instead of BigQuery.

Set up:

'
🖥️Data source = Azure Devops Server (Boards only)

✅Power BI Desktop for Report Server (RS): data refresh works

❌Power BI Report Server: scheduled data refresh is not possible.
Error message : "Scheduled Data Refresh is not available for reports. The report does not have any external data connections defined or is using an unsupported data source. Learn more" 

🔍Supported data sources for Power BI Report Server (here😞
The list does not contain any information about Azure devops, as far I can see.

❔@d_gosbell: do you or anyone know if it is possible to connect to Azure devops data from Power BI report server?

I see that OData is among the supported types. Should this be used to connect to Azure devops on report server?

All help appreciated.

Kind regards !

[d_gosbell]

@cosm no it is not possible to connect to Azure DevOps. The problem is that Report Server does not support Entra Authentication.

You can either:

1. refresh manually in desktop and upload a static copy of the data periodically.
2. you could use some other tool to extract the data from ADO and put it into a source that is supported by Report Server
3. you could publish the report onto a workspace on the cloud service 

[cosm]

Thanks for the reply @d_gosbell !

Maybe you answered already, but I just want to double check:

Do you think a solution using OData will work?

In other works, that you can connect from Power BI to Devops using Odata?
(I havent managed that yet)

Kind regards

[d_gosbell]

No I don't think it will work as you still have to authenticate using an EntraID

[cosm]

Ok, thank you.

❔@d_gosbell Do you any suggestions to determine if a particular data source can be used on Report Server?

And do you have any reference to documentaion or similar to understand how the lack of authentication with EntraID can affect different data sources ?
So that in early phase, it is possible for a report developer to know if the data source can be refreshed on report server, before time is used on report development.

Background:
It can be a bit hard to determine, if a data sources can be used on Report Server.
A particular data source may be easily accesible in Power BI Desktop, but not in Power BI Report server
So a report developer may experience that everything works in early development phase on Power BI Desktop, and upon publishing to report server realize that it is not possible to connect to or schedule refresh.

Either because of authenticate - as you mention - or if the report server lack a specific driver - eg. this case with PostgreSQL as data source (https://community.fabric.microsoft.com/t5/Report-Server/Data-source-connection-on-Power-BI-Report-Se...)

[d_gosbell]

The on-prem Report Server is designed to work with on-prem data sources. You should not have any issues if you are using on-prem data sources.

If you are using cloud based data sources or a mix of cloud and on-prem then the recommendation would be to deploy your reports to a cloud based workspace and use data gateways for on-prem data.

[d_gosbell · Accepted solution]

Checking the list of supported data sources for Power BI Report Server here - It shows that Google BigQuery is marked as not supported for scheduled refresh.

Sorry, but I don't know of any work around for this other than moving the data to a supported data source or doing manual refreshes via Power BI Desktop.