Forum Discussion
Database connection via Power BI Service
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.
Thanks for the reply, but I think it's not accurate in my context. The data source is the power bi service not the database itself, the options to edit the data source are greyed out.
In the meantime I found the correct answer - the client retrieves the data via the cloud, not directly from the gateway, definetly not from the db directly.
Full explanation in the How the gateway works section of the following:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/service-gateway-onprem
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.
- SpoilerMy case is about direct query mode, not import data.
Just to be clear for anybody else interested this thread - in Power BI Desktop when getting data via a direct query dataset published on power bi service, the data is retrieved via the cloud using the credentials configured for the connection in the gateway. Confirmed this today by disconnecting from the corp domain (i.e. making the on prem db host unavaible to my client machine) and creating a new report in the Power BI Desktop from the dataset on Power BI Service and it works without issues.If you get this to work that's excellent - problem solved.
I tried like you describe and it doesn't work for me. I don't need the exact feature so I don't think I will dig deeper, but this does go against everything I've read about this - see the link to an article below where it's clearly stated that this doesn't work this way (last paragraph). It's from 2016, perhaps there are some configurations now that invalidate this - but I haven't seen any mentioned.