Real time dashboards

[MbProg]

I have some dashboards that show the statitic data of some customers, their invoices...

We can use Power BI REST API to push data to Power BI Service and show it in dashboards. It works great if you add rows. But there are many update transactions in my data source that change the value of specific rows. Till now I have not found any way to update a row in a dataset in Power BI. Just adding new rows or deleting the whole rows ( I have about 500K rows, so I don't want to delete all rows and insert them again every time). So I need a way to update specific rows in my dataset to have real time dashboard.

Is there any way to accomplish this? If not, does anyone know any other way or option or software to have real time dashboards in Power BI by updating also rows in the datasets?

[ankitpatira]

@MbProg Not possible currently but you should vote for this idea here. 

[MbProg]

@ankitpatira

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?

[ankitpatira]

@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.

[CahabaData]

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? 

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@CahabaData I don't think there is definitive documentation out there. I wrote a blog on my understanding based on working with the tool and documentation here which should shed some light on a bit of nomenclature.

It doesn't address cloud specific. So I guess I would say that cloud sources still abide by the same 3 connection types, and that if you are using an API you are just importing data - and as a result of it being a cloud source, it doesn't require a gateway to refresh.

There is a 4th type I suppose, and that would be "live streaming" data from stream analytics or using the live stream tiles.

I believe your case falls into "Import with cloud data source".

My 2 cents.

[CahabaData]

ah thanks both for clarification ....

[vhello]

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/