How to connect Power BI service to a document database?

[TonyH]

We're looking at using MongoDB or ArangoDB (or similar) and we'd like to know if it is possible to connect Power BI online to using data live from sources such as those?  We want to provide our clients with the ability to create their own visualisations from their data (which will be hosted and provided by us to Power BI - hopefully?).  Is this possible and how would it be possible.

We accept that if it is required, we could create a read only OData API for Power BI to consume to get the data but ideally, it would be the online service (not the desktop application) that is actually consuming it.

[Greg_Deckler]

The only document db supported natively right now I believe is Azure DocumentDB in the Desktop but I do not believe that it supports a live connection. You might be able to get there via OLE DB or R but OData sounds like it might be the way to go or perhaps JSON.

[TonyH]

Thanks @Greg_Deckler.

Am I right in assuming that if I download the desktop version, connect to an OData source and then upload it, it will continue to update without the gateway if the connection is in the "cloud"?

Thanks,

Tony

[Greg_Deckler]

Correct. It will use the "cloud gateway".