Forum Discussion
Connect to data gateway
davishert I assume you installed the On-Premises Data Gateway. Once you have that installed, you need to go to the Power BI Service and under "Settings" (the gear) click on Manage Gateways. This will give you a list of the OPD gateways you have installed and have access to. You can use this example of creating a data source to a SQL Server as an example walkthrough. But essentially you need to create a data source with the connection strings that match exactly to the connection strings in your Desktop file. Then, publish the PBIX file and the gateway will appear as one that you can use under your dataset to refresh.
that was helpful, thanks.
On your last sentance; I understand initially your data connecting was a problem because of 1 table that was not part of your server. However I think fundamentally PBI Service intention is to to mash up data from differing sources. So while I don't have a good example at hand I am wondering about this point. For instance if you had sales data from a daily sales database application and had perhaps a daily web visitor statistics from your online store - - can one make a single data set of these 2 together?
To my mind tables are tables - in Desktop one can import tables from differing sources. Then if there is a suitable join field - you can query them together. I am just assuming when published to Service that the data connections can be made.
If you can figure that out and let me know, I would be grateful. What I've learned so far is that in PowerBI Service you cannot combine datasets. A published data set (from PowerBI desktop) with different sources won't connect to a data gateway in PowerBI Service, but I hope I'm wrong.
The order of operations is important (from my experiance). You want to make sure the data source/s exist in the OPD Gateway prior to publishing the Desktop file. That way, it automatically recognizes the data source and will allow you to use it.
To the multiple data source question. You can use multiple data sources in the Desktop, you just need to make sure that all the data sources are supported and created in the OPD gateway. Otherwise it will either not work, or default to the personal gateway.
ah ok - am learning BI myself in some regards - comfortable in desktop and making DAX calculations has been my focus - - data connection & Service are still new. Maybe Anonymous or others further up the learning curve on this point will jump in & clarify.
Am surprised to hear one cannot - as in my mind I really am thinking mash up of differing data sets was what it was all about.......