How to automatically refresh Power BI report connected to SAP Business WH, in Power BI Service

[Diego_J_Acevedo]

Hello Power BI community,

I lead a BI team and currently we are developing some reports to track Sales KPIs.

These reportes will have to use SAP Business Warehouse connector (sorry, my desktop app is in spanish):

we haven't done the connection yet, but we know this is the one we will use since we will connect to a SAP Hana Core Data Services (CDS) resource, which is in development right now.

Since these reports will be consumed in Power BI Service by multiple users, we will need to schedule automatic updates. We wanted to know if a direct connection to the cloud is sufficient for this purpose, or if the validation of this connector requires an on-premises gateway to work well.

Thank you in advance for your response,

king regards

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi @Diego_J_Acevedo ,

If the SAP Hana CDS resource is hosted in the cloud and is accessible through the Internet, you may not need a local data gateway to refresh data in the Power BI service.Power BI can connect directly to many cloud services.

If the SAP Hana CDS resource is hosted locally or on a private network, a local data gateway is required to securely connect the Power BI service to the data source. The local data gateway acts as a bridge, providing secure data transfer between the local data source and the Azure cloud service.

For SAP Business Warehouse and SAP HANA, Power BI supports DirectQuery connectivity to set up real-time data refreshes without moving data into Power BI. If the data source is not accessible through the cloud, this method requires careful consideration of gateway settings. For configuration information, you can check out these two documents: DirectQuery in Power BI - Power BI | Microsoft Learn and Configure scheduled refresh - Power BI | Microsoft Learn

Best Regards

Yilong Zhou

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