Forum Discussion
Real time dashboards
In this article it says that Power BI has Live Connection to those sources (for example SQL SERVER). How is it about those? When a record in a table in the SQL SERVER database changes (is updated), does it update in Power BI too? Or does it delete the whole table and imports the whole table? Or does it just import the new records?
MbProg Live connection to sources is a feature called DirectQuery in power bi. Using that mechanism no data is imported in power bi service. So you need to install and configure power bi gateway on your on-premise server and each time you interact with visuals in power bi service a query gets generated and is sent back to be executed on on-premise data source and results returned back. With DirectQuery there is no import of tables and data.
I'm misunderstanding the terminology/definition:
Direct Query requires a Gateway and is involved with On Premise data sources
While I thought that 'Live Connection' was for PBI Service to a cloud data source that did not involve any Gateway....
wrong?
Direct Query works for
- SQL Server
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure SQL Data Warehouse
- SAP HANA
Not just for On-Premise Databases but also Azure Databases. Only On-Premise databases will need the Gateway.
If you build your data in Azure Database and just edit the row value with code, and the Power BI report can update via Direct Query at anytime with each load/refresh of the browser . (No scheduled refresh)
More documentation:
https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-azure-sql-database-with-direct-connect/
