Getting Power BI to refresh daily from online sources

[ThomasAndersen]

Dear all,

I am a bit of a rookie in the whole power BI environment, and this is my first post/question. So please spare with me if completely mistaken. My account is a Pro trial. 

What i am trying to build is a complete integration between our datawarehouse (contains google adwords data historically, PostgreSQL) and our website's database (MySQL). The idea is that i can build a dashboard that can track our adwords performance using conversion metadata stored in our own database, and as such measure performance, profitability etc.,

I have build a range of reports in Power Bi desktop, and now i am trying to have these reports available online and have them updated daily (automatically). But for some reason i cannot get this to work. Perhaps it is a lack of understanding of how Power Bi services works or maybe i am making some significant errors. 

What i have done is, a) setup the entire report/visualization in Power Bi Desktop. b) Published it to my workspace in app.powerbi.com. 

When i try to setup schedule refresh, the option is grayed out and i cannot get it to do it daily (as desired). My assumption is, that since i am only using online sources of data (no locale files are included in my dataset), that i Power BI can run daily updates? 
When i try to manually refresh my dataset from app.powerbi.com, i am getting an error regarding my Power Bi - personal gateway is offline. As i understand it, this means that i need to install the gateway, and Power Bi will update from my locale computer. This is far from optimal. 

Question 1) Is it not possible, with my datasources, to have PowerBI automatically update my data daily?
Question 2) If so, what should i do, to have my dataset updated on a daily basis?

Thank you in advance!

[Greg_Deckler]

If your data sources are on-premises or the equivalent of on-premises, then you will need a gateway (personal or enterprise). When I say "equivalent of on-premises" what I mean is that if there is no native cloud integration with Power BI. So, for example, if you run an Azure SQL DB, that is SQL in the cloud and there is a native cloud integration with Power BI for that. However, if you run an SQL Server as IaaS, I believe that is essentially going to be the same as if you were running that SQL Server locally on-premises because there is no native cloud integration with Power BI in that scenario. So, while the data source may technically be "cloud", it really isn't as far as Power BI is concerned.

I may have picked a bad example here, but I suspect that this is what you are running into.

Oh, and the solution would be to install one of the gateways.