Forum Discussion
Power BI Pro - Power BI gateway needed?
Hi murmeltier07,
If you import the data and publish the report to service and that you don't want to configure refresh your dataset, then here the gateway is not required. Then you can use the report to create dashboards. By this way, you can refresh your data in Power Bi desktop and republish again and again.
What's more, All users in the service are either Free or Pro. The main difference between a Free or Pro user is centered around sharing and collaboration. Only Pro users can publish content to app workspaces, consume apps without Premium capacity, share dashboards and subscribe to dashboards and reports. Please notice, the Pro license is also required for the recipients. For more information about pro license, Please refer to the online document.
Regards,
Frank
I believe if you're not going to want to manually refresh things within your PowerBI Service every time your data changes on premises, then you need a data gateway to connect to your data, gather any updates, and push them up.
However, in Desktop version, you just need to use the DirectQuery whenever you are connecting to your database so that any change will be synched with PowerBi as well