Forum Discussion
Advocate IGateway datasource limit breaking ISV use case
Community SupportHi Piloos , Thank you for reaching out to the Microsoft Community Forum.
The 1000 data sources per gateway cluster limit is enforced at the gateway level, not at the workspace or service principal level. Service Principal Profiles (SPP) work for workspaces but do not currently override the gateway datasource limit. Microsoft’s documentation mentions SPP for “gateways (personal mode only)”, meaning it does not apply to standard enterprise gateways.
Please try below possible workarounds:
- Create additional gateway clusters to distribute data sources. Each cluster will have its own 1000 data source limit, so by adding more clusters, OP can bypass the limitation.
- If Import mode is being used, consider switching to DirectQuery, which removes the need for scheduled refreshes via the gateway. In DirectQuery mode, the dataset connects directly to MySQL at query time, eliminating the need for per-datasource definitions in the gateway.
- Instead of connecting each customer database directly to Power BI, create an ETL pipeline that Extracts customer data, loads it into a centralized data store, Power BI then connects to this single centralized data source instead of creating one gateway data source per customer.
Also please refer to the below documentation for more information:
Move multi-customer apps to service principal profile model - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
Develop scalable multitenancy applications with Power BI embedding - Power BI | Microsoft Learn
What is data warehousing in Microsoft Fabric? - Microsoft Fabric | Microsoft Learn
Manage on-premises data gateway high-availability clusters and load balancing | Microsoft Learn
A special thanks to lbendlin for your valuable input.
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Thank you.
- lbendlin
Super User
This enforcement of "1000 items" limits coming up on March 25th is mildly alarming. Reading between the lines this is Microsoft telling us that they misjudged usage patterns and ran out of resources without telling us.
Piloos
lbendlin wrote:This enforcement of "1000 items" limits coming up on March 25th is mildly alarming. Reading between the lines this is Microsoft telling us that they misjudged usage patterns and ran out of resources without telling us.
Sounds indeed alarming. Do you have a link to a source in order for us to investigate the possible impact?