Forum Discussion

po's avatar
po
Post Prodigy
5 years ago

Security on dataflow access/use

Hi,   Have power bi premium and can see access to dafalows currently disabled.     Woudl like to turn on access to this but only to selecteed users, such that only certain users can create and u...
Need Help
jeffshieldsdev's avatar
jeffshieldsdev
Solution Sage
5 years ago

Unless you check enable there and a box appears prompting for a list of users to allow, enabling will allow anyone to create dataflows in Workspaces they have Contributor permission or greater to.


dataflows are secured at the workspace level, there's no other security. You'll have to think about your strategy a bit, maybe have a workspace called "Master Data Dataflows" for your date table and the like, give a few users Edit access to create and maintain and anyone that should be able to use those dataflows in their own dataflows or in Power BI Desktop Viewer permission.

EDIT: https://www.nickyvv.com/2019/11/quick-tip-sharing-power-bi-dataflows.html

po's avatar
po
Post Prodigy
5 years ago

Thanks for reply.

 

If have a dataflow which say pulls in calendar info, I'm assuming if people have datasets which wish to connect to this dataflow, fact dataflow will be executing only once say every time calendar updated (yearly or adhoc if need make manual chnage), that datasets referencing a dataflow don't cause it to be executed.

 

Is this understandng correct?

 

Thanks

 

T

  • jeffshieldsdev's avatar
    jeffshieldsdev
    Solution Sage
    5 years ago

    Correct.  When a dataflow refreshes, it saves the output in ADLS behind the scenes, in CSV format...when consumed, Power BI Service or Desktop reads from this cache.

    • po's avatar
      po
      Post Prodigy
      5 years ago

      Thanks for the info.

       

      We will alos have some fairly chinky datasets, tens possibly hundreds of millions of rows we would intend to add to via incremental refresh on dataflow.

       

      Currently we have millions of rows being added to dataset via incermenatl refresh.

       

      Fact csv files just wondering efficiency of large datasets with dataflows as opposed to incermental refresh into dataset.  Is there a recommendation in this regard as to which is better with huge volumes?

      • jeffshieldsdev's avatar
        jeffshieldsdev
        Solution Sage
        5 years ago

        Dataflows are not a data warehouse, they're an ETL tool.  Remember dataflow output is stored in CSV files behind-the-scenes, so anything consuming from it will have to read-in that whole CSV file and process it with the Power Query engine--there's no querying as if a database, or query folding from the client.

         

        There is the Enhanced Compute engine, which caches the data from CSV into a SQL store (again, behind the scenes--you have no visbility or control over how this works) but the SQL store will only be used by other dataflows in Premium Capacity when those sources are used as Linked Tables in the dataflow.  Power BI Desktop will always use the CSV-store.

        EDIT: https://ssbipolar.com/2018/11/22/positioning-power-bi-dataflows/