MySQL Data Source Refresh Fails in Power BI Service Due to Encryption Issue question

Hi Anonymous 

You're encountering a common issue that arises due to differences in how Power BI Desktop and Power BI Service handle MySQL connections—particularly with regard to encryption requirements. In Power BI Desktop, Microsoft allows users to explicitly accept and proceed with an unencrypted connection if the MySQL server doesn't support SSL/TLS encryption. This is facilitated through a user prompt, which you experienced when it offered to fall back to an unencrypted connection. However, in Power BI Service, this fallback option doesn't exist. The service operates in a more secure, cloud-hosted environment, and it enforces encrypted connections by default for MySQL, meaning it does not allow unencrypted connections at all. As a result, the refresh fails with the error: "The MySql source doesn't support encrypted connections."

To resolve this and successfully set up scheduled refresh in Power BI Service, you have a couple of options:

Enable SSL/TLS on your MySQL Server: This is the preferred and most secure approach. Configure your MySQL server to support encrypted connections by enabling SSL. You'll likely need to generate or obtain valid certificates and configure the MySQL server to use them. Once that’s done, test the connection from Power BI Desktop using the encrypted option, then republish the report to the service.

Use an On-Premises Data Gateway with Custom Connector Configuration: If you must use an unencrypted connection for legacy reasons and cannot modify the server configuration, you might be able to use an on-premises gateway where you configure the MySQL connector locally with the Use SSL=false setting. However, this still may not bypass the encryption requirement on Power BI Service depending on policy updates from Microsoft.