Forum Discussion
Database connection via Power BI Service
So I'm dealing with the following situation - I have published a PBIX consisting of a direct query connection to an on prem SQL Server 2014 database to the Power BI Service. I've setup the enteprise gateway with a connection to said SQL Server instance. Everything is working when accessing the dataset from app.powerbi.com and Power BI Desktop.
My question is - in Power BI Desktop, when getting data via this dataset published on Power BI service, is the client conecting directly to the SQL Server host, or to gateway or to the "cloud"? Basically via what path does the data reach the client.
Thank you!
Perhaps I was misunderstanding your original problem, if you are downloading the dataset (Report) from the PowerBI Portal then yes, you will be downloading the data last refreshed in the portal. If you press "Refresh" in Power BI Desktop, it will connect straight to the Sql Server Database, it will NOT go through the Gateway and it will NOT connect to Power BI Service (Cloud) and "re-download" the data from there.
The documentation for the Gateway is only relevant for Power BI Service, not Desktop.
But if you found the information you need, then that great.
7 Replies
Thank you! Do you know of any product documentation that has this explicitly covered?
The Power BI desktop is not using the Power BI Gateway nor the data stored in the Power BI Service hence if you refresh it needs to connect directly. You can see this simply by opening the report in your Power BI Desktop client and go to Data Source Settings (under Edit Query button on the toolbar). Select the data source in question and see that it's connecting directly to the database.
