Dataflow Gateway

[Anonymous]

Hi all, first of all, this is NOT about connecting Dataflow to a gateway, but very much about having a Gateway that is of "type" (Data source) of Dataflow. Please check out the screenshot.

As we can see, the Authentication method is OAuth2, and if I am to edit the credentials, I need to login with my own account first. My question then is, am I then right to assume, by using my credentials here, this Gateway can only connect to those Dataflows in workspace that I have access to? 

Also, I noticed that such gateway is required, when I have more than one sources (one from dataflow, another from an on-prem database), which then forced me to need to have gateway configured for both to allow data refresh. Anyone of you has any idea if this is a best practice?

Thanks.

[edhans · Accepted solution]

Yes, your credentials will only work for the dataflows you have access to. It would be better for a Power BI admin with more rights to workspaces set up that connection for you then allow you to use the gateway. Note that others using that gateway would have access to the same datasources.

You only need to put the dataflow through a gateway if you are going to be mashing up the dataflow with onprem data. If you are just pulling tables in you don't need to.

So if your dataflow has a product table and you want to use it, no need. but if you want to merge that product table with some on prem data, then you have to run both through the gateway.

[Anonymous]

Hi Edhans, thanks for the clarification, it helps!

Indeed you are right, this is only required when we are mashing up data between dataflow and onprem. 

That brings me to another question, would it be more clean cut, if one is to build a dataset that gets data solely from tables in dataflow, and use this datasets to mash with other onprem data. In that case, we avoid giving out access of a Dataflow gateway that as too much access to workspaces where some users are not supposed to have? Thoughts?

Thanks.

[edhans]

I might go another route. Use dataflows to stage data from on-prem sources and only give a few people the ability to create those dataflows and access the gateway.

Then let others create reports solely from dataflows. No gateway access needed.

You can control permissions by where you store the relevant dataflows and who has permissions to those workspaces.