Trying to understand Premium licensing

[guyinazo]

I have a few basic questions that I hope can get  some straight forward basic answers.  I have developed Power platform objects for years, including Power BI reports and dashboards.  I am now working with a small regional healthcare place that has around 500 employees.  Each person has an E5 license for M365.  When is a Premium license required?  Does Import/Direct Query matter?  If we have someone who refreshes a report with data created from SQL Server each morning, then publish it, does that require a premium license?  This is a place that cannot do Per Capacity and is really trying to limit Premium licenses.  Thanks for the information and direction.

[GilbertQ · Accepted solution]

Hi @guyinazo 

Typically premium is used either because more capacity (memory and CPU) is required or it is cheaper to license many free users on the premium capacity.

if the organization has E5 licenses and does not need more than 8 refreshes a day and more than 1GB in dataset size then I would see no reason to go for Premium.

You could also use a Power BI Gateway (which is free for the gateway but you would need a windows server) to automatically refresh the data coming from SQL Server.