Cognos to Power BI migration

Hi. Your developers need power bi desktop that is the office tool to create the semantic model and refreshes. When they are ready, they are deployed at Power Bi Service. That's the place for hosting and sharing the reports/models. In order to let the data flow between the sources and the models at the Service, sometimes you need a Gateway. The gateway should be installed in a VM that can actually see the sources. The client is logged with an account that will configure the credentials at service later. Once you configure that, it's ready to go.

- Dev flow: Power Bi Desktop -> Publish -> Power Bi Service

- IT-Dev-Etc: Install Gateway in a place the data can be seen and oracle driver.

- IT-Dev-ETC: Power Bi Service -> Add sources at Gateway Menu -> configure schedule refresh for Semantic model

I hope that helps,

P/D There are some cloud sources that won't need gateway, like bigquery, snowflake, azure, etc. Oracle needs.

dkirby10b 

On‑premises data gateway for Oracle

64‑bit Oracle client/ODP.NET or the newer built‑in Oracle managed driver option. Configure a Gateway data source with a service account credential. Map your PBIX to this data source, end users don’t need DB credentials. 

Power Query Oracle database connector - Power Query | Microsoft Learn

Licensing/capacity for viewers

To publish to a shared workspace you’ll need Pro or PPU. View access depends on capacity:

With Premium/Fabric capacity workspace users can view apps/reports including paginated report, which is good for broad distribution.

Paginated reports in Power BI: FAQ - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Hi dkirby10b 

To replatform Cognos reports that rely on parameterized stored procedures in an on-prem Oracle database to Power BI, you would need a combination of Power BI infrastructure components and security setup to enable centralized access while preserving user-specific inputs. First, you would create Power BI reports in Desktop that accept parameters, which can be mapped to the stored procedure inputs. To allow up to 100 users to execute these reports without requiring individual database credentials, you would use a Power BI data gateway to securely connect the Power BI service to your on-prem Oracle database using a single service account. This gateway acts as a bridge, enabling live queries or scheduled refreshes while keeping credentials centralized and managed. Once published to the Power BI Service, you can share the reports via workspaces or apps, and users can interact with the reports—entering their own parameter values—without direct database access. Depending on the refresh needs, you may configure either DirectQuery (for live parameterized queries) or import mode with dynamic filtering for efficiency. Proper setup of roles, workspace permissions, and gateway mapping is essential to maintain security and ensure that users can run reports seamlessly without touching the underlying database credentials. This approach allows replatforming from Cognos to Power BI while maintaining parameter flexibility and controlled access.